Alternative linker win32/64

Sebastian Schuberth sschuberth at gmail.com
Sat Feb 26 03:10:19 PST 2011


On 24.02.2011 19:41, Walter Bright 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

IMHO, that is a common misbelief when it comes to executable 
compressors. AFAIK, the time required for decompression is 
overcompensated by the time required to read less data from disk, even 
still nowadays.

> won't be any smaller because recompressing compressed data doesn't make
> it smaller.

There really needs to be no compression or back magic involved to make 
the executable size for a simple program like

---8<---

import std.stdio;

void main(string[] args)
{
     writeln("Hello World, Reloaded");
}

---8<---

smaller than the current 286 KiB! Some dead code elemination would 
already do, I guess.

-- 
Sebastian Schuberth


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