Comment by kazinator

4 years ago

"no glibc" makes programs bigger; they have to contain their own library. Presumably, that small TC executable made some DOS/BIOS calls; that would be its OS-supplied library. That gives you things like file I/O and reading the keyboard.

Anyway I don't think you're quite explaining it (in spite of a good effort and nice points) because, look, the mere hash table module in my TXR language has 30K of machine code. This happens to be 32 bit x86:

  $ size opt/hash.o
     text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
    31558     100       8   31666    7bb2 opt/hash.o

It's just a bunch of hash table functions.

I cannot say, oh, my hash table functions are almost bigger than Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS because of documentation (there isn't any), autocomplete (none and not applicable) or because I have networking, multitasking (also not applicable).

I mean, Turbo Pascal 3 probably has some internal hash table itself, and provides an entire language and IDE, in the same space as my hash table stuff.

/bin/ls on Debian 11, x86_64:

   size /bin/ls
     text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   131876    4728    4824  141428   22874 /bin/ls

What are the amazing features in ls? It does ANSI color and probably something with extended attributes; so, ooooh! that must be why it's four times bigger than Turbo Pascal 3?

2 comments

kazinator

Reply
jart  4 years ago

I'm not sure what code size has to do with networking and multitasking. Size coding requires technique and caring about size. In the case of hash.c it's likely because the hash function has unrolled loops and is being inlined into all the functions that use it. It'd also reduce size a lot if a loop were used to iterate over the names and function pointers during initialization. I normally gain an intuition for these kinds of things because I have a keyboard shortcut that shows me the assembly of whatever code I'm writing, but I had to implement that feature into my editor myself, so I'm not sure how many other people do that. Bloat also isn't a mandatory price of the modern age we love. For instance, languages exist for 64-bit architecture that have binaries less than 400 bytes in size.

  • delian66  4 years ago

    > For instance, languages exist for 64-bit architecture that have binaries less than 400 bytes in size.

    In V (https://github.com/vlang/v/) for example, with the currently experimental native backend, you can produce executables, that are < 400 bytes:

        $ cat examples/hello_world.v
    println('Hello, World!')
    $ ./v -b native -o hw examples/hello_world.v
    $ ls -l hw
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 delian delian 183 Mar 13 17:51 hw
    $ ./hw
    Hello, World!