Alternative linker win32/64

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On 24.02.2011 21:41, Walter Bright wrote:
> Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
>> On 18.02.2011 11:00, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>>
>>> The nice thing is reduction in half of the resulting binary size.
>>
>> That's indeed nice! The unnecessarily huge size of binaries created 
>> with D / Optlink was in fact something hindering me to use D at all!
>
> I'm sure that linker is doing it by writing compressed exe's. This 
> means that it has the same memory footprint, and it loads slower 
> because it must be decompressed. Also, if you store it in a zip file, 
> the zip file won't be any smaller because recompressing compressed 
> data doesn't make it smaller.

Tried that, it's still compresses to roughly 50% of it's size. Well, I 
no expert but a glance at disassembly shows that at least strings  / 
imports are intact.
For what it's worth the IDA control flow analysis shows a bulk of 
unreferenced procedures in optlink's one.
So maybe the case is that they also included a decent stripper.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky