[fpc-pascal] What's in Hello World

[tsiegel at softcon.com]

For what it's worth, the hello world program in powerbasic 
(https://www.powerbasic.com) comes to a whooping 7,168 bytes. That's the 
console version, not the gui version, that's a bit bigger, but by not 
much more.  I have an epub reader I've been working on for a few years, 
on and off, and that program which has a complete gui, web browser 
calls, and the like, weighs in at just over 75K.  I always use 
powerbasic if I'm writing a windows only program, since it's ability to 
produce such small executables is well known.  Heck, it even has a 
#bloat command in the compiler to artificially inflate the size of the 
exe files it builds, because so many didn't believe that it was 
producing an actual windows binary.

I use FPC when working on cross platform programs, since it can compile 
for many platforms, unless I need a gui.  In that case, I use java, 
since I can put it in grid mode, and then I don't have to worry about 
how the gui is laid out.  Something that typically takes sighted 
assistance, and a great deal of time otherwise.

Of course, GCC produces small binaries too, and I'll use that too when 
the need arrises.

It all depends on what I am working on, and where it is going to run.


On 1/7/2024 7:33 PM, Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024, Sven Barth via fpc-pascal wrote:
>
>>>>
>>>> - FPC compiled as is: 388976 B
>>>> - FPC compiled with full smartlinking: 55920 B
>>>> - FPC compiled with C linkage: 388760 B
>>>> - FPC compiled with full smartlinking and C linkage: 56792 B
>>>
>>> Maybe it is a good idea to add these numbers to the above WIKI page, 
>>> to quantify
>>> the discussion and to illustrate what the effect is of various options.
>>
>> Probably... 🤷‍♀️
>>
>> And just for the fun of it, the size if the RTL is compiled into a 
>> dynamic package and that is used:
>>
>> - no smartlinking: 15784 B
>> - with smartlinking: 15608 B
>>
>> With the librtl.so having a size of 649912 B which will ammortize 
>> itself if multiple applications use dynamic packages.
>
> Nice result. Smaller than a C program :-)
>
>>
>>> I think we should also explain why linking to C has almost no effect 
>>> on actual binary size.
>>
>> That's mainly because the functions that differ between FPC_USE_LIBC 
>> and not are rather slim syscalls anyway, so the main bunch of Pascal 
>> code is still the same in both cases.
>
> I know this, but most likely users will not realize this... :-)
>
> Michael.
>
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