Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!harmonica.cis.ohio-state.edu!schanck From: schanck@harmonica.cis.ohio-state.edu (Christopher Schanck) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: TC2.0 upgrade thoughts, and a decision... Message-ID: <32962@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 29 Jan 89 21:22:11 GMT References: <32234@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <13872@cup.portal.com> <4547@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> <4197@drivax.DRI> <32925@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <4205@drivax.DRI> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Christopher Schanck Distribution: usa Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 43 In article <4205@drivax.DRI> alexande@drivax.UUCP (Mark Alexander) writes: >In article <32925@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Christopher Schanck writes: >>... the bottom line for compilers is the .EXE size... > >But even this is not always true. Some compilers (MetaWare High C, >for example) will generate a 20K executable for "hello world" >programs, if you don't use some little tricks at link time, while >Turbo and Datalight produce much smaller EXE files. Yet High C >produces smaller code, on the average, than either of the latter. But I *said* to compare .exe sizes, you *had* to use all the little tricks at your disposal in order to be fair. From an enduser's standpoint, which is what matter's wrt commercial programs, file size is the cat's meow. >The reason for this is that the EXE file includes all sorts of code >from the runtime library. The size of this code is highly dependent >upon how clever and industrious the writers of the library were. >MetaWare is great on code generation, but their runtime library bites >the wax tadpole. Again, I would say poor libraries are a reflection on the whole compiler package. Since most of us don't have the luxury of multiple libraries, the quality of a compiler's libraries are important aspect of the compiler. > [ BSS and UDATA discussion ] See point 1. >Yet another item that increases EXE file size is debugging information >used by CodeView (I don't know about Turbo Debugger). This has been covered before. >The bottom line when comparing code size is the size of the code >segment in an individual OBJ file. Well, so we argue. I think this discussion has really run its course; this is obviously a fairly personal issue. Next we will be discussing pros/cons of various looping structures! >Mark Alexander (amdahl!drivax!alexande) -=- "I do not THINK in regular expressions, and I am not NP-complete!" --- Christopher Schanck, occasional human being. schanck@.cis.ohio-state.edu