newbie: Why Cygwin/Egcs compiled executable is so bloated

[Chris Faylor]

On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 06:57:48PM -0600, Luke Liu wrote:
>I understand that it is not as easy to work with dll with cygwin as with
>Visual C++ or Borland C++.  However, when I compiled the Hello world program
>generated by Visual C++ 6.0 wizard with Cygwin B20.1, the executable was
>530KB, meanwhile the mingw32 build was 315KB. Then I got the egcs2.95.2 and
>after renaming old lib for mingw32 by watching the gcc include/lib search
>path, I was able to reduce the executable of hello.exe with mingw32 to
>173KB. The size with Cygwin remains > 500KB.
>
>The compiler switch I used were
>	gcc -Os -mwindows -v -mno-cygwin -e _mainCRTStartup
>and 
>	gcc -Os -mwindows -v -e _mainCRTStartup
>
>respectively. Am I simply didn't enable the correct gcc switch? BTW, the
>VC++6.0 compiled debug executable is 157KB and the released version should
>be much smaller.
>Thanks,
>
>Luke
>
>P.S. I found that due to some screwed security of something, I cannot post
>to the solutioncentral from company. :-(((

Actually, you did post to solutioncentral three times. :-)

Here is my answer:

By default, gcc adds debugging information to every executable.  To
remove this you can either add a '-s' to the gcc command line or use the
strip command on the resulting executable:

strip file.exe

This should greatly reduce the size of the executable. 

cgf

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