Compiler: Size of generated executable file

[retard]

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:24:06 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:

> dsimcha wrote:
>> Vote++.  I'm convinced that there's just a subset of programmers out
>> there that will not use any high-level programming model, no matter how
>> much easier it makes life, unless they're convinced it has **zero**
>> overhead compared to the crufty old C way.  Not negligible overhead,
>> not practically insignificant overhead for their use case, not zero
>> overhead in terms of whatever their most constrained resource is but
>> nonzero overhead in terms of other resources, but zero overhead,
>> period.
>> 
>> Then there are those who won't make any tradeoff in terms of safety,
>> encapsulation, readability, modularity, maintainability, etc., even if
>> it means their program runs 15x slower.  Why can't more programmers
>> take a more pragmatic attitude towards efficiency (among other things)?
>>  Yes, noone wants to just gratuitously squander massive resources, but
>> is a few hundred kilobytes (fine, even a few megabytes, given how cheap
>> bandwidth and storage are nowadays) larger binary really going to make
>> or break your app, especially if you get it working faster and/or with
>> less bugs than you would have using some cruftier, older, lower level
>> language that produces smaller binaries?
> 
> 
> 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.

A 1 Tb spinning hard disk doesn't represent the current state-of-the-art. 
I have Intel SSD disks are those are damn expensive if you e.g. start to 
build a safe RAID 1+0 setup. Instead of 1000 GB the same price SSD comes 
with 8..16 GB. Suddenly application size starts to matter. For instance, 
my root partition seems to contain 9 GB worth of files and I've only 
installed a quite minimal graphical Linux environment to write some 
modern end-user applications.