visual studio statically linked application way too small

Question

I am building a win32 application in C++. I have two static lib projects (open source libs) that I am compiling and using in the application. The static libraries for these projects are both over 50MB. However, my executable is only 3MB. This doesn't seem right, even though if I copy the executable (only) over to another machine everything seems to run fine.

I have followed all of the visual studio instructions for VS2010 static linking a project. i.e. Properties->Framework And References-> Adding the static lib project.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

A static link will include just the parts you're using from the libraries, so it could easily be that your executable is much smaller than the libraries.