Re: [Mingw-users] code bloat?

[Keith M. <kei...@to...>]

Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> But the NetBSD-generated versions seem to have an additional
> 170 Kbytes of overhead in the .exe, which isn't much these days I
> suppose, but when the BSD/OS-generated version is 45 Kbytes and
> the NetBSD-generated version is 220 Kbytes it's slightly
> jaw-dropping.
>
> Has there been a general upwards creep in executable code size
> that I just haven't noticed before?

I'm not sure that I fully understand your question, but I think
you are comparing code sizes for Win32 executables, cross compiled
using MinGW cross-compilers on two different host platforms.

Are the versions of the two MinGW cross-compilers the same in each
case?  Are you stripping the generated code?  (I don't see switches
to strip, in your examples, but then I don't see the -g to include
debug information either).

I recently installed i586-mingw32-gcc on my GNU/Linux box, following
the procedure described here:
http://www.mingw.org/MinGWiki/index.php/build%20a%20Win32%20x-compiler%20for%20Linux

Compiling a trivial "Hello World!" app using this cross-compiler,
with `-g -O2', and comparing results with identically compiled code
from the native MinGW gcc on Win32 gave this:
  $ ls -lh hello.exe /usbdisk/hello.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 rgbl0264 544   939k Mar  8 16:12 /usbdisk/hello.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 rgbl0264 544    17k Mar  8 16:12 hello.exe

(The image on the usbdisk is the cross-compiled variant).

After stripping, I see a much more reasonable comparison:
  $ ls -lh hello.exe /usbdisk/hello.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 rgbl0264 544   5.5k Mar  8 16:17 /usbdisk/hello.exe
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 rgbl0264 544   5.0k Mar  8 16:17 hello.exe

In this case, the cross-compiled variant is still slightly larger
than the native, but the cross-compiler is a slightly newer version
of GCC than the native, which may explain the residual discrepancy.

(Native compiler:
  $ gcc --version
  gcc.exe (GCC) 3.2.3 (mingw special 20030504-1)

 I think the cross-compiler is 3.4.x, but I'm not able to check
 right now).

I've no idea why the unstripped code from the cross-compiler is
so much more bloated than the natively compiled code.

Regards,
Keith.