GDC compilation bloat?

[Iain Buclaw]

On 8 September 2018 at 09:40, Kyle De'Vir via D.gnu <d.gnu at puremagic.com> wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something, but the binary size that GDC outputs on
> compilation, for a very simple Hello World example, is very large, even
> after stripping it.
>
> Comparison between DMD and GDC, all after stripping, plus compilation
> commands:
>
> dmd -mcpu=native -O -release -inline -boundscheck=off -of=main main.d
> 669 KiB
>
> gdc -frelease -march=native -O3 -pipe -fstack-protector-strong -fno-plt -o
> main main.d
> 1.4 MiB
>
> Why are they so different? Is that how large GDC produced binaries usually
> are?

The runtime makes use of libgcc, backtrace and atomic libraries that
dmd wouldn't have.

I'd consider it quite safe to build with -shared-libphobos so you
don't have all dependencies pulled in statically.