Re: Gnat Executable Size

[Niklas Holsti <nholsti@icon.fi>]

Robert B. Love wrote:
> 
> Over in the Modula-2 newsgroup somebody was asking about free compilers.
> Another person pointed out GNAT as suitable for his task and free.
> Ada vs. M2 wasn't the issue.  The original poster said he'd tried GNAT
> on a simple "hello world" program and was surprised to see a 200K
> executable.  Others said their favorite M2 compiler yielded about 10K
> executables for this.
> 
> I tried a simple Put_Line program myself with GNAT under Linux and
> got an 84K program.  I've played with Pragma Optimze(Space) and
> Pragma Supress (All_Checks) but it stays about  84K.
> 
> I then run strip on the GNAT generated executable and get it down to
> about 47K.
> 
> How small can GNAT get "Hello World"?  What compiler options and pragmas
> would you use for this?

On my i486 Slackware Linux 2.0.0, GNAT 3.05 generates an executable
for Put_Line("Hello world!") of 22842 bytes (not stripped) or 10400
bytes (stripped). Compiler options were "-c -g". Seems comparable
to the M2 sizes. Source code below.

- Niklas

with Text_IO;
procedure HELLO is
begin
   Text_IO.Put_Line ("Hello world!");
end HELLO;