Re: [Caml-list] Executable size?

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 04:14:54PM +0000, John J Lee wrote:
> > How does O'Caml compare with languages like Haskell (ghc), C and C++ for
> > executable size?  Does compiled code depend on a runtime library (and how
> > big is that, if so)?
> 
> This is not a criticism of OCaml, but the executables do tend to be
> quite large. This seems mainly down to the fact that OCaml links the
> runtime library in statically. There was previous discussion on this
> list about the merits and problems with linking the runtime
> dynamically.

This isn't as bad as it sounds.  A simplistic "hello world!" application
in Ocaml weighs in at 112K, versus 11K for the equivelent (dynamically
linked) C program- almost entirely either statically linked standard
libraries and infrastructure (garbage collections, etc.)- stuff that
doesn't expand with larger programs.

A naive assumption would be that an Ocaml program is about 100K or so 
larger than the equivelent C program.  Not much, considering how easy it 
is to get executables multiple megabytes in size.  But in my experience 
(depending upon the program), Ocaml gets a lot more code reuse, and thus 
can actually lead to smaller executables.

Unless you have special constraints, the difference between C program 
sizes and Ocaml program sizes are not enough to be worth worrying about.

-- 
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                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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