Sender: root AT delorie DOT com
Message-ID: <37E01676.D74EEBDC@pmail.net>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 23:58:14 +0200
From: Fredrick Backman <fredrick DOT backman AT pmail DOT net>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.36 i686)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, Snowman <idzy AT priv5 DOT onet DOT pl>
Subject: e: Why the executables r so big ????
References: <c_LD3.2608$_3 DOT 44552 AT news DOT tpnet DOT pl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Snowman wrote:

> HELP HELP
> Im using DJGPP.

:-)  [good thing this isn't rec.cooking.vegetarians then]

> And I don't understand while the files that I compile are so big .
> When I compile for example this small source code
> (about 40bytes):
>
> main()
> {
> printf("Hello");
> return 0;
> }
>
> The exe file is over 100Kb Big .  Why ????
> (I'm not using the Allegro libary or anything)
>
> When I look at some other peoples programms
> examp.:" DosArena."
>  Its just about 200Kb
> and The source code was really long.
> I also made a simple game (using Allegro),
> and the exe-file is over 700Kb heavy.
>

The following is taken from the DJGPP FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions):

8.13 Why are DJGPP `.exe' files so large?
=========================================

**Q*: I compiled a trivial "Hello world" program and got a 80KB
executable
file.  That's ridiculously bloated!*

**Q*: I switched to GCC 2.8.1, and my C++ executables are considerably
larger
than when compiled with GCC 2.7.2.1!*

*A*:  Did you link with `-s' switch to `gcc', or run `strip' on the
output of
the linker?  If not, the executable includes the debugging symbols,
which
makes it quite a lot larger.  (It is not recommended to strip the
symbols
except when distributing production programs, because this makes
debugging
very hard indeed; that is why `-s' is not passed to gcc by default.)

[End of snipper from FAQ]

I think the Allegro FAQ has some suggestions on how to optimize the code
to make the executable smaller. You may also want to look at executable
compression (.EXE packers) which I never use myself but I think there's
a few of them which work okay.

Keep in mind though that the difference in _performance_ may not improve
very much if you make the .exe file smaller, IMHO the main reason to go
through this is (a) to make the download .ZIP file smaller and (b) it's
cool to have a 235kb exe rather than 700.

Cheers
Fred

--
Fred Backman
Lead Wizard
Binary Spells
www.binaryspells.com
-=-=- Check out our latest space arcade game: AntiTron v0.93b! -=-=-