About Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition

[Richard Heathfield]

(e-mail address removed) said:

While I've not checked all of these, it's likely that all of the above
with large executables were doing static links of the CRT.

That was deliberate. In each case, I just banged out a command line from
memory, making no particular attempt to minimise the size. I was after the
default picture, so to speak.

I was surprised at just how much the Linux gcc version got crunched - even
with static linking - when I told gcc I cared about size. And then
stripping the binary yielded even more savings.

 

[robertwessel2]

That was deliberate. In each case, I just banged out a command line from
memory, making no particular attempt to minimise the size. I was after the
default picture, so to speak.

Although the OP did ask specifically about small executables. I don't
see any reason to assume that the default options for a compiler would
be a good test of that (no more than I'd expect fastest exectable to be
the default). If there is a good default option for a compiler it
would probably be generated code with the least amount of surprise. So
statically linked CRT, no use of "new" instructions, etc.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

(e-mail address removed) said:

Although the OP did ask specifically about small executables.

Yeah, I know, but considering OP is probably newbie, I didn't want to
involve them in remembering deep switch syntax.

 

[Roland.Csaszar]

Fairly fast, but MSVC beats me in generated code speed.
Actually the best compilers are:

Intel compiler: Best x86 compiler generator in the world.
No other compiler beats that in performance

This is not true. Actually the Pathscale (and sometimes the PGI)
compiler is faster (on Linux and AMD64, they have hired a software engineer
to port the compiler to Windows 64 last year).

AFAIK the Windows Version of the PGI compiler is between Intel (sometimes
faster than Intel AFAIK) and MSVC performancewise.

 

[Friedrich Dominicus]

Of the compilers I listed above, gcc and VC2005 are both freeware. Borland
also do a couple of freeware compilers. See also Digital Mars, MinGW, lcc,
and Pacific C. I suppose there's also lcc-win32, but I tried to get it
earlier today and failed completely so I suppose it's no longer available.

You are wrong about that, it's all too well available usually.

Not that it matters here's the size with of the program with lcc-win32
dummy_hello.exe 3104 Bytes

Gcc makes here:
8819 bytes out of it

Now what have we proved or won now?

Friedrich

 

[Friedrich Dominicus]

Except that all my figures were for statically linked programs, so your
figure is actually 42KB, which is in the worse half of the list.

So what? You did not mention it anywhere.

Friedrich