• Claus D. Volko (1/1) Jan 14 2009 What bothers me about D is that the executables dmd generates are quite ...
• dsimcha (8/9) Jan 14 2009 Some simple programs have almost 200 kb. I've tried packing them with kk...
• Lutger (3/8) Jan 14 2009 MS C++ generated executable use a shared runtime by default, try compili...

Claus D. Volko <cdvolko gmx.net> writes:

What bothers me about D is that the executables dmd generates are quite large.
Some simple programs have almost 200 kb. I've tried packing them with kkrunchy,
the result are still about 100 kb. By contrast, with Visual C++ such programs
would be only a few kbytes (in release mode). Why is D generating such big
executables? How is it possible to get them smaller?

dsimcha <dsimcha yahoo.com> writes:

== Quote from Claus D. Volko (cdvolko gmx.net)'s article
 What bothers me about D is that the executables dmd generates are quite large.

Some simple programs have almost 200 kb. I've tried packing them with kkrunchy,
the result are still about 100 kb. By contrast, with Visual C++ such programs
would be only a few kbytes (in release mode). Why is D generating such big
executables? How is it possible to get them smaller?

Well, one reason is because D has a larger runtime that includes things like GC.
Theoretically, this could be made into a shared lib, but I think there are
higher
priorities in the D community.

Lutger <lutger.blijdestijn gmail.com> writes:

Claus D.  Volko wrote:

 What bothers me about D is that the executables dmd generates are quite
 large. Some simple programs have almost 200 kb. I've tried packing them
 with kkrunchy, the result are still about 100 kb. By contrast, with Visual
 C++ such programs would be only a few kbytes (in release mode). Why is D
 generating such big executables? How is it possible to get them smaller?

MS C++ generated executable use a shared runtime by default, try compiling with
static libraries and see the difference. In D there's all sorts of typeinfo,
the GC, the D and also the c runtime taking up space. The way to make
significantly smaller executables is building a shared D runtime.

It's not too bad, a mingw compiled hello world is almost 500kb... (thanks to 
iostreams mostly).