EXE size on WindowsXP

[Gary]

I'm getting about 5.50 meg size for a simple "hello world" EXE on a Windows XP system. AFAIK debugging is turned OFF. What is the reason for huge size?

[Anonymous]

Hi Gary, look at this...
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=66

[Anonymous]

Thanks... I had a suspicion that Lazarus itself might be compiled with debugging... but according to that link... only LCL is compiled with debugging.

Wouldn't it make sense to put it in the FAQ so people like me wouldn't have to ask the same question all the time?

BTW... using strip and upx, I got the exe down to 416KB from 5.5mg.

[Anonymous]

Using strip takes a lot of the size, but, I am still curious why the size is 5 Mb.
There has to be a lot of redundant bytes in that exe file..

[marmin]

Remember, UPX is a compression utility and Lazarus should be able to reduce File size without any external application like zip or UPX.

I wonder why the initial size is 1.20 (with Strip). Additional code seems to be compiled with great efficiency! And the compiler is really, really fast.

I trust Lazarus will come up with some solution, it's beta now..

grz,
M.

[Almindor]

Windows32 LD does not listen to --strip from lazarus. Therefore even if you use smartlinking and no debug info + stripping you get 9megs(atleast I did). Manualy going to the directory and typing strip myproject.exe It went down to ~1.5Mb and I can also UPX it to ~500kb.

I have no idea why ld doesn't stip when lazarus tells it to tho. It's only broken on win32
You also need to have stip in path to do what I did.
Strip is included in your FPC dir(if you got it with lazarus it's C:\lazarus\pp\bin\win32-x86