Thread: Creating small executables

Hi all,

Im using Visual Studio 6 for creating my win32 apps however no matter how i code my project it always produces and exe of about 500k. I thought c++ was a low(ish) level language capable of producing small exe's? I mean the projects im coding are relatively small, no more than about 100 lines of code. So why are the exe's so big? Is it down to the actual compiler or is it something im doing wrong? If its me then what are the techniques for producing small code and if its the compiler are there any options which will help me?

Thanks

wow 240k, thats completely ridiculous. I might have a look at another compiler and see what I think. Im trying to get away from Microsoft products as they are always bloated with useless junk. I'll give that dev-cpp ago.

Thanks for the reply both

Originally Posted by laserlight

Dev-C++ uses the MinGW port of GCC, and due to both technical and legal limitations the executable size may still be larger than you expect.

Can u please tell me what are those 'legal' limitations that prevent the executable size to be small?

Why is my C++ binary so large?

C++ programs using the Standard Template Library (ie/ #include <iostream>) cause a large part of the library to be statically linked into the binary. The need to statically link the stdc++ into the binary is two fold. First MSVCRT.dll does not contain C++ stdlib constructs. Second the legal implications of generating a libstdc++.dll are restricted by the licensing associated with the library. If you wish to keep your file size down use strip to remove debugging information and other verbatim found in the binary.

strip --strip-all SOMEBINARY.exe


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copied from that link laserlight provided

Hmm, under visual c++ 2005, a "hello world" console app using c++'s <iostream> library, and all default settings, creates a 7.5k exe file.

I'd suggest using libctiny though....check out this article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/01/hood/

all you have to do is add libctiny.lib to the linkers's additional dependencies, and you end up with a small exe. I've personally used it on both console and gui windows apps (straight win32, no MFC or anything), and it works great, although there are times when I want to use a certain function and it ends up not working anymore.