Re: Size of linked program increasing with new version of GNAT.

["Jean François Martinez" <darkquark99@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday, December 30, 2014 12:56:43 AM UTC+1, Randy Brukardt wrote:
 The size of Hello world tells one 
> very little about the size and efficiency of a real program.
> 

Trying to bring some common sense in the discussion (not fr(om you Mr Brukardt)

If we intend is to measure the actual quality of the compiler at generating small code then the significtaive variable is the size of the .o file not the size of the executable.  The executable is parasited by things like runtime, libraries, dynamic linker (or first stage of dynamic linker) and so on.  So the more capable your environment and the biggest the program.  

So if the program is small and will run it on a half decent box you don't care. Remember the EEPC, that five years old laptop good for web surfing and little more?  It had 1G of memory. A million Ks.  So who cares about the size of hello world?

If your program has megs and megs of code then the overhead due to a more capable runtime will be completely irrelevant respective to the "pure" (that is .o) size of your program and third party (ie not related to Gnat) libraries.

If you have to squeeze your program on an Arduino then size matters but the maintainer of Gnat for Arduino has tuned the compiler default restrictions (gnat.adc), runtime and Gnat related libraries for small size so you can't draw conclusions basing on what you see on x86.   Still more irrelevant because it is different machine code thus a different code generator so a bigger .o on X86 does not necessarily translate on a bigger .o on Arduino.

Just my 2c

Jean-François Martinez