[Mingw-users] Re: Increase in executable size with MinGW 3.1.0

[Oscar F. <of...@wa...>]

Richard Russell <ri...@rt...> writes:

[snip]

> Do either of you know the reason for the 'align 16' behavior in the
> newer linker, and whether it is possible to disable it ? 

I think this alignment is related to performance issues. IIRC, modern
x86 CPUs are faster reading memory on 16 bytes boundaries.

`ld' is not the only culprit about this. `gcc' does most alignment
decisions. Search `gcc' and `ld' documentation for "align" and you
will see several options for aligning sections, functions, labels,
jumps, loops, etc.

That said, it is probable that most of the size increase comes from
larger runtime MinGW libraries. There was several functions added to
them since the 2.95.x times.

-- 
Oscar