What makes EXE's grow in size?

Question

My executable was 364KB in size. It did not use a Vector2D class so I implemented one with overloaded operators.

I changed most of my code from

point.x = point2.x;
point.y = point2.y;

to

point = point2;

This resulted in removing nearly 1/3 of my lines of code and yet my exe is still 364KB. What exactly causes it to grow in size?

Answer 1

The compiler probably optimised your operator overload by inlining it. So it effectively compiles to the same code as your original example would. So you may have cut down a lot of lines of code by overloading the assignment operator, but when the compiler inlines, it takes the contents of your assignment operator and sticks it inline at the calling point.

Inlining is one of the ways an executable can grow in size. It's not the only way, as you can see in other answers.

Answer 2

What makes EXE’s grow in size?

External libraries, especially static libraries and debugging information, total size of your code, runtime library. More code, more libraries == larger exe.

To reduce size of exe, you need to process exe with gnu strip utility, get rid of all static libraries, get rid of C/C++ runtime libraries, disable all runtime checks and turn on compiler size optimizations. Working without CRT is a pain, but it is possible. Also there is a wcrt (alternative C runtime) library created for making small applications (by the way, it hasn't been updated/maintained during last 5 years).

The smallest exe that I was able create with msvc compiler is somewhere around 16 kilobytes. This was a windows application that displayed single window and required msvcrt.dll to run. I've modified it a bit, and turned it into practical joke that wipes out picture on monitor.

For impressive exe size reduction techniques, you may want to look at .kkrieger. It is a 3D first person shooter, 96 kilobytes total. The game has a large and detailed level, supports shaders, real-time shadows, etc. I.e. comparable with Saurbraten (see screenshots). The smallest working windows application (3d demo with music) I ever encountered was 4 kilobytes big, and used compression techniques and (probably) undocumented features (i.e. the fact that *.com executbale could unpack and launch win32 exe on windows xp)..

In most cases, size of *.exe shouldn't really bother you (I haven't seen a diskette for a few years), as long as it is reasonable (below 100 megabytes). For example of "unreasonable" file size see debug build of Qt 4 for mingw.

This resulted in removing nearly 1/3 of my lines of code and yet my exe is still 364KB.

Most likely it is caused by external libraries used by compiler, runtime checks, etc. Also, this is an assignment operation. If you aren't using custom types for x (with copy constructor), "copy" operation is very likely to result in small number of operations - i.e. removing 1/3 of lines doesn't guarantee that your code will be 1/3 shorter.

If you want to see how much impact your modification made, you could "ask" compiler to produce asm listing for both versions of the program then compare results (manually or with diff). Or you could disasm/compare both versions of executable. BUt I'm certain that using GNU strip or removing extra libraries will have more effect than removing assignment operators.