From:	"Tony O'Bryan" <aho450s AT nic DOT smsu DOT edu>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Excessive exe sizes
Date:	Tue, 25 Nov 1997 06:35:31 -0600
Organization:	Southwest Missouri State University
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Message-ID:	<347AC613.5046@nic.smsu.edu>
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sl wrote:

>         That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You are allocating MEMORY here, not diskspace!
> Regardless of if you allocate the array staticly or dynamically it should NOT use up diskspace!

	That depends on the situation, of course.  For allocating arrays that
are auto-initialized, how else is the program to know what values the
array should have at startup?  Have the program code fill the array at
run-time?  That takes much more disk space to write the code overhead. 
The only optimization in this case (that I can think of) is to have gcc
check if the array is hard coded to autoinitialize to all zeros.  If so,
then the startup code could be generated to run a small loop to write
zeros to all locations.  That case would eliminate disk bloat for large
global arrays.

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