Program size, linking matter, and static this()

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/20/11 9:00 AM, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:
> 16.12.2011 21:29, Andrei Alexandrescu пишет:
[snip]
> Really sorry, but it sounds silly for me. It's a minor problem. Does
> anyone really cares about 600 KiB (3.5x) size change in an empty
> program? Yes, he does, but only if there is no other size increases in
> real programs.

In my experience, in a system programming language people do care about 
baseline size for one reason or another. I'd agree the reason is often 
overstated. But I did notice that people take a look at D and use 
"hello, world" size as a proxy for language's overall overhead - 
runtime, handling of linking etc. You may or may not care about the 
conclusions of our investigation, but we and a category of people do 
care for a variety of project sizes and approaches to building them.

> Now dmd have at least _two order of magnitude_ file size increase. I
> posted that problem four months ago at "Building GtkD app on Win32
> results in 111 MiB file mostly from zeroes".
[snip]
> ---
> char arr[1024 * 1024 * 10];
> void main() { }
> ---
[snip]
> If described issues aren't much more significant than "static this()",
> show me where am I wrong, please.

Using BSS is a nice optimization, but not all compilers do it and I know 
for a fact MSVC didn't have it for a long time. That's probably why I 
got used to thinking "poor style" when seeing a large statically-sized 
buffer with static duration.

I'd say both issues deserve to be looked at, and saying one is more 
significant than the other would be difficult.


Andrei