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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: EXE file size
Message-ID: <14433@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 12 Nov 90 13:29:02 GMT
References: <16398@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <4302@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <4302@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US> jak@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US (Jay A. Konigsberg) writes:
>I have wondered the same thing. Mainly, why are C exectuables so large.
>foo.c       11
>foo.o      256 
>foo       4815

The executable contains a run-time startoff module (crt0.o), plus some
library functions needed by crt0.o, such as exit().  Clever C library
implementations are able to arrange that the stdio overhead normally
needed to support exit() is not linked in when stdio functions are not
invoked directly by the application; otherwise, there would also be
all the static _iob structs and the code for fclose(), fflush(), etc.
crt0.o also is responsible for collecting environment variables and
program arguments so that they can be passed to main() etc.