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From: Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Suitability of Ada as a general-purpose language
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2012 20:21:42 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2012-08-03T20:21:42+00:00
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On Fri, 03 Aug 2012 21:21:15 +0200, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:

> Does that mean that “not decently sized” applications are not Ada's
> target? Then, any one can define what “decently sized” is? It's not fair
> that when a compiler fails in an aspect (an aspect which is not relevant
> to its main audience, I agree), to get the point away with pretexts.
> 
> The Hello World program here, is a place‑holder for tiny applications.
> There may be good reasons for people to expect tiny applications to have
> tiny executable images: there may be a lot of them, whose size
> cumulates, and they may be launched often for a short time, in sequence;
> better a tiny executable image here. Then, the big Hello World image can
> give people an honest enough feeling of bloating or else poor
> dependencies management capabilities.
> 
> GNAT producing big executable images for tiny applications, and GNAT
> purpose not being at producing efficient executable image for that kind
> of application, is not a reason to push that issue away.

You make a good case. And I am seeing executables of under 1K on the AVR, 
so it is definitely possible (though without much library or any RTS). 
I haven't tried linker settings or "strip" or other tools to see how 
small an executable I can get on Linux. 

But reducing executable size shouldn't be something we have to work to 
achieve; the tools should do it for us. Randy points out that non-Ada 
specific tools may not be well suited to helping us...

- Brian