Re: GNAT Codesize

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Haug said

"Assuming that all the runtime check code is in the runtime
libraries, what is gnat doing? It seems to me that gnat produces
very inefficiente code.

The whole program is never smaller than 400kbyte. Is it possible
to use a dynamic link library for the runtime library? Is there
any chance to reduce the code size?"

You actually have no idea how big your program is, so your guess that
this is gnat inefficiency is incorrect. Undoubtedly you are building
with debugging information present, at least in the runtime library
routines. The debugging informatoin is typically MUCH larger than the
actual code. So strip the objects or executables (depending on your
system) if you want to make the executables smaller (but you won't
be able to debug the resulting program).

These day when 400K of disk space costs 4 cents, most people prefer
to keep the debugging information around which is why this is the
default behavior in the normal setup. 

Note that if you do strip the objects of the library, you must be careful
to preserve the original time stamps.

On some systems it is possible to use a dynamic link library, and the
standard distributions for Linux and SGI do this.
We will probably introduce this in additional distributions as time
goes by.