Re: [Caml-list] Executable size?

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Sven Luther wrote:

> > 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
> 
> Mmm (on i386 and with 3.07+2) :
> 
>  $ cat hello.ml
>  Printf.printf "Hello World!\n"
>  $ ocamlc hello.ml -o hello.byte
>  $ ls -l hello.byte
>  36025 hello.byte
>  $ ocamlc hello.ml -custom -o hello.custom
>  $ ls -l hello.custom
>  181718 hello.custom
>  $ ocamlopt hello.ml -o hello.native
>  $ ls -l hello.native
>  149877 hello.native
> 
> That said :
> 
>  $ cat hello
>  #!/usr/bin/ocamlrun /usr/bin/ocaml
>  Printf.printf "Hello World!\n";;
>  $ ls -l hello
>  68 hello
>

i386 (Athlon 2200+, actually), Redhat 9.0 and Ocaml 3.07 unpatched:

$ cat temp2.ml
let _ = print_string "Hello, world!";;
 
$ ocamlopt -o temp2 temp2.ml
$ ls -l temp2
-rwxrwxr-x    1 bhurt    bhurt      112213 Nov 12 13:48 temp2
$ cat temp3.c
#include <stdio.h>
 
int main (void) {
    puts("Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}
 
$ gcc -Os -o temp3 temp3.c
$ ls -l temp3
-rwxrwxr-x    1 bhurt    bhurt       11228 Nov 12 13:49 temp3
$


Using printf brings in most of the printf library, and adds about 40K to
the size of the executable.  But you only ever need to include it once.
Doing an ls -l `ocamlc -where`/*.cma shows at most about a meg of total
libraries to include everything in the standard library (I'm assuming that
the 988K toplevellib.cma is only needed by the top level).

If I was willing to let my code out, and download size was important, and
I didn't mind requiring my users to have a compiler/interpreter for the
language installed, then I'd be inclined to just ship bzipped source code
tarballs around.  Maybe with a little compile/install script bundled.  
That way you don't have to ship around the libraries at all, and source
code tends to be smaller than binary executables, and compresses a lot
better than equivelent executables (source code should get at least 10:1 
compression- playing with compressing Ocaml executables I'm only getting 
about 5:2 compression).

That being said, binary executables- especially binary executables with 
any special libraries they need statically linked- have the advantage of 
the making the client need to preinstall as little as possible.
 
> Friendly,
> 
> Sven Luther
> 
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Brian

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