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From: sidney@saturn.ucsc.edu (Sidney Markowitz )
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Code size generated by Turbo C
Message-ID: <7010@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
Date: 19 Sep 90 22:15:27 GMT
References: <139400009@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
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Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz
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In article <139400009@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> klg0582@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>executable code for the program of same purpose is larger in C than in
>pascal. Is this generally true or is there a way to avoid this?
>
>Also, if I added in an irrelevent function to a program (the other
>function won't have any link to this added-in function at all), the
>code becomes larger accordingly. Could anyone tell me why?

The size difference is mostly due to the portions of the RTL getting
linked in. Look at a linker map to get an idea as to what is taking up
space. In particular, using printf will bring in a lot of code that
you may be able to avoid by using more low-level output functions.

Turbo Pascal has a "smart linker" which will ignore library routines
if they are not referenced in your program. Unfortunately, this is
made possible by the special nonstandard format of TPUs, and Turbo C
and Turbo C++, which use the Microsoft OBJ format cannot do that so
easily.

-- sidney markowitz <sidney@saturn.ucsc.edu>