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From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Peter, can you explain to the Amigoids (was: NeXT software size
Message-ID: <486G8ox$1@cs.psu.edu>
Date: 8 May 91 03:25:38 GMT
References: <d*bGl.#*1@cs.psu.edu> <11866@uwm.edu> <*05Gx0x&1@cs.psu.edu> <1569@ewu.UUCP>
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In-Reply-To: mpierce@ewu.UUCP's message of 7 May 91 04:37:35 GMT
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In article <1569@ewu.UUCP> mpierce@ewu.UUCP (Mathew Pierce) writes:

   Same program, using Manx Aztec C V3.6

   producing only object file
   cc -s test - 120
   normal compilation
   cc test    - 5944

   Bear in mind that this is an OLD compiler.

It probably doesn't matter too much.  How much can you optimize "hello
world?"

   Also, when I do cc -s blah.c, I get only object code, what does
   cc -s -object blah.c  do on your compiler?  Does that produce 
   only object code too?  The reason I ask is that it looks like
   it does, but I see that your listing shows a.out* for that
   compilation.

-s strips the debugging info, and -object tells the compiler to use a
different object file format.  On the NeXT, as well as most Unix
machines, the program is normally stored in two segments(pages), a
data and a text segment(execuatable code).  On the NeXT, each the page
is 8K, so even small programs will be 16K large(8K text + 8K data).
When the a segment becomes larger than 16K it automatically grows to
24K(i.e. It grows by 8K each time).  This is done to allow the program
to paged(be moved from disk to memory) in faster.

-Mike