How to size optimize the executable?

[Lutger]

Claus D.  Volko wrote:

> What bothers me about D is that the executables dmd generates are quite
> large. Some simple programs have almost 200 kb. I've tried packing them
> with kkrunchy, the result are still about 100 kb. By contrast, with Visual
> C++ such programs would be only a few kbytes (in release mode). Why is D
> generating such big executables? How is it possible to get them smaller?

MS C++ generated executable use a shared runtime by default, try compiling with static libraries and see the difference. In D there's all sorts of typeinfo, the GC, the D and also the c runtime taking up space. The way to make significantly smaller executables is building a shared D runtime.

It's not too bad, a mingw compiled hello world is almost 500kb... (thanks to  iostreams mostly).