Compiler: Size of generated executable file

[Roman Ivanov]

Walter Bright Wrote:
> I agree that a lot of the concerns are based on obsolete notions. First 
> off, I just bought another terabyte drive for $90. The first hard drive 
> I bought was $600 for 10Mb. A couple years earlier I used a 10Mb drive 
> that cost $5000. If I look at what eats space on my lovely terabyte 
> drive, it ain't executables. It's music and pictures. I'd be very 
> surprised if I had a whole CD's worth of exe files.
> 
> Next, even a very large executable doesn't necessarily run any slower 
> than a small one. The reason is the magic of demand paged virtual 
> memory. Executables are NOT loaded into memory before running. They are 
> memory-mapped in. Only code that is actually executed is EVER loaded 
> into memory.

I would say you're severely understating the issue. There are plenty of valid reasons why small executables are desirable. Imagine every Unix utility being several megabytes large. There are hundreds of them just in /usr/bin directory. The concerns about updating security problems and bandwidth usage are pretty rational as well.

Besides, there is also an issue of marketing. People have a perception that larger programs run slower. Usually this perception is right. I would have hard time "selling" D programs as efficient to my boss, if the executables are much larger than their counterparts in other popular languages.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what would be involved in separating the stuff that bloats executables into a shared library?