Problem with g++ creating huge binaries

[Felix Köhler]

Hello everybody,

I would like to ask for some advice considering a compiling issue. When 
compiling a C++ program that contains STL headers, cygwin g++ seems to 
produce overly bloated code, compared to the same version of g++ (3.2) 
on other (Linux) plattforms or other compilers (Microsoft Visual C++). 
E.g. the following "hello world" program.:

#include <iostream>
int main () { std::cout << "Hello, world!!" << std::endl; return 0; }

Compiled with the command line:
g++ -O2 -Wl,-s hello.cpp -o hello_cpp
produces hello_cpp binaries of the size:
Linux (gcc version 3.2)                                          : 
3.756      Bytes
Cygwin (gcc version 3.2 20020927 (prerelease))   : 219.136  Bytes
MSVC++ 7.0                                                       : ca. 
3000 Bytes (dont know exactly any more)

I think this issue has crept up before in this mailing list, but none of 
the advice given so far seems to apply to/ work with gcc 3.2. Strip.exe 
doesn't yield any effect as ld already stripped the executable (-Wl,-s 
option). This might not be that much of a problem when producing single 
large binaries or using pure C Code, but when having a big set of little 
C++ commandline tools the speed offset becomes noticable. I vaguely 
remember this is a problem with the Template headers which can't be put 
into a dll other than defining a set of heavily used instantiations that 
are put into a dll. To be of any value this probably would need to be a 
pretty firm feature for the cygwin distribution, so you can make this 
dll a prerequisite.

I'd like to ask if anybody has ever done something like that and the 
"feature-is-there-you-just-have-to-find-it" or whether it's planned by 
the compiler gurus or whether there are principal problems why this will 
never work.

Thanks for your attention,

Felix Koehler



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