Re: Reducing the size of executables produced by GNAT

[Hibou57 <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Well, well,

I've finally managed to custom a runtime with GNAT for Windows.

The big stuff was with the exception runtime.

It appears that I could go from 43KB down to 25KB, when removing
traceback and exception information functionalities.

So those two sole functionalities weight near to 20KB. I was a bit
surprised, but in the mean time, I was seeing that the elaboration of
the involved package does not cost a lot of execution at start up.

I was to go further, but stop there, beceause the conclusion I went to
at this point was suffiscient to tell me that this is unusefull to go
further.

The conclusion is : there is a weight for some functionalities which
may indeed be unused, but the elaboration cost at application start up
is low. So the size of 45KB for a very simple application does not
means there is an expensive overhead.

More from this conclusion : the risk coming with numerous
modifications of the runtime code is too hight compare to the
advantage one may get with these modifications.

Thus, I prefer to let the runtime as-is, as stable as it is, beceause
there is not enough benefits to modify it.

I still recognize that the code could be lighter, but GNAT is GNAT,
and it is dedicated to serve in the area of big applications, and
requirements in this area make some design choice of GNAT rather
obvious. GNAT is definitely not well suited for small applications,
but GNAT is still a good Ada compiler and is well suited for
application with which ones size is not a matter. GNAT is good enough
for little application as soon the incompressible size of the runtime
is not a matter, in the sense that the elaboration of the runtime is
does not cost so much.

I still recognize then that an Ada compiler producing smaller code
will be welcome, but this will require services apart of GNAT.

That's all of my conclusions after managed to setup a lighter
runtime : this is unusefull to persist in this way, and there are more
profits to not to touch it than to reduce it.

Have a nice day,

Yannick