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I have a trivial "Hello world" C++ program that is compiled to 500kB executable by MinGW g++ compiler under Win XP. Some say that is caused by iostream library and static link of libstdc++.dll.
Using -s linker option helped a bit (reducing 50% size), but I would by satisfied only by <10kB executable. Is there any way how to achieve this using MinGW compiler? Portability is not a big concern for me.
Is it possible to copy libstdc++.dll with the executable using dynamic linking? If so, how to achieve this?
Solved: I was using MinGW 3.4. Now I updated to latest MinGW 4.6 and the size was decreased by 90% to 50kB, with -s option even to 9kB, which is fully sufficient. Anyway - thanks everyone for help. Here you go my results
C++ Hello World program using iostream
MinGW | no options | -s option
------------------------------
3.4 | 500kB | 286 kB
4.6 | 50kB | 9 kB
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You can run some symbol stripper utility on the final exe file. It helps reducing size in many cases. One such utility can be found at neoworx.com. There is a utility named ASPack, this utility also helps in compressing your exe files up to 50%.
This file should start downloading in your standard download folder. This file is only 85KB so it should download very quickly.
Apparently the most significant factor is the number of bytes the compiler writes out to the resulting file. Basically what you're asking is: "What does my binary executable actually contain?"
Many "unixy" things on MinGW are painfully slow, because Windows has no fork() . Windows only has CreateProcess() , which is quite different. Unix shells and GNU Make do a lot of forking, so running these under MinGW results in "emulated" forks, which are really slow.
Flags to use:
-s like you've been doing to strip symbols-lstdc++_s to specify dynamically linking against the libstdc++.dll
-Os to optimize the binary for size.By default mingw static links to libstdc++.a on Windows.
Note that the lstdc++_s flag is only in MinGW with GCC > 4.4, I believe.
134
Give strip and UPX a try.
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Using the -Os flag might help. That optimizes for size.
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