Re: GNAT Codesize

[Gavin Smyth <sgs1@scigen.co.uk>]

There have been a number of people noting that GNAT DOS executables are
quite large. Someone has done some work in shrinking DJGPP executables
by effectively compressing the files, and building an uncompressor
into the startup code. You can find Laszlo Molnar's DJP utility with
the rest of the DJGPP stuff (eg, Simtel somewhere under /vendors/djgpp/v2
I think, or at DJGPP's home, http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/). You can
run this tool on the executable produced by GNAT or you can do as I did,
and automatically invoke it as part of the build process - the final 
stage
of a GNAT build under DOS is to call COFF2EXE.BAT. I replaced the 
supplied
one with one that calls DJP on the last line - see below:

   My COFF2EXE.BAT

          @echo off
          copy %1 %1.cof>nul:
          strip %1
          stubify %1
          del %1
          rename %1.cof %1
          djp %1.exe

It does seem to make a worthwhile saving in disc space, at the expense
of a little startup time, and some extra build time, and I haven't
had any problems with it so far.

Gavin