CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gccsizeexecutable
neuron
neuron

Reputation: 1926

Why GCC produces huge executable comparing to VCC?

I have a project that's not really big. With Visual Studio's C++ compiler the executable is 100+KB. But with mingw GCC it goes up to 500+ KB. Same thing happens on Linux. That's for the release build. For debug build GCC produces 1.4MB while VS's C++ compiler only produces 400+KB. What's the reason that causes such a huge discrepancy? Does it have anything to do with static/dynamic linking? What can I do to reduce the executable size produced by GCC?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2584

Answers (2)

user541686
user541686

Reputation: 210352

  • Did you pass the -s flag to GCC?

  • Is Visual Studio linking with the CRT statically or dynamically? How about GCC? It's likely that VC is linking dynamically (/MD flag, instead of /MT) whereas GCC is linking statically (-static-libgcc flag, and otehrs)... try making them consistent and then seeing if there's a difference.

    One way to tell is to check if your VC-linked executable depends on msvcr80.dll (or a different version), and to see if your GCC-linked executable depends on some mingw DLL. If they do, then they're dynamically linked; if they truly run standalone, then they're statically linked.

Upvotes: 1

Romain Hippeau
Romain Hippeau

Reputation: 24375

See this page on how to shrink GCC output size: http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Reducing_Executable_Size

Upvotes: 2

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