Re: Sizes of executables from Unix compilers

[arny@cbnewsl.att.com (arny.b.engelson)]

In article <1930@sparko.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>Thought I'd try to shed a little light on the executable-size issue, since
>it has come up again. First, a few statistics for "hello, world." Here
>are 2 programs:
>
>with Text_IO;
>procedure Hello is
>begin
>  Text_IO.Put_Line("Hello, World.");
>end Hello;
>
>#include <stdio.h>
>main()
>{
>   printf("Hello, World\n");
>}

I can't believe I'm doing this.  I got curious enough to go run these on
a VAX/VMS system using DEC's Ada and C compilers.  Given the results, I
decided to post them (and start a war I'm sure, but what the hell)...

First of all, I ran the compilers with their default settings, no special
optimizations, pragmas, options, nothing.  Second, the source looks exactly
like Mike's programs above.  Last, the results:

Ada executable =  6 blocks (512 byte blocks)
C   executable = 87 blocks   "

Obviously, I now conclude that Ada is 14.5 times more efficient than C.

Go and analyze this to death if you want, it's still one of the stupidest
language comparison tests I've ever seen; I just found the results amusing
enough to post.  But then I didn't get enough sleep last night and it's
been a long week.

  -- Arny Engelson   att!wayback!arny