Neil Heller wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

RJ> Bill Birrell wrote in a message to Jasen Betts:

RJ>  BB> Hi Jasen,
RJ>  BB>     Mirabile dictu! I have msdev working on the desktop. It is
RJ>  BB> mainly C++, but will accept C code it you twist its arm.
RJ>  BB> I stripped out everything that wasn't essential, and have just
RJ>  BB> compiled "Hello World" for Windows, and run it, so it'll do.

RJ> Just out of curiosity,  how big is that resulting executable?  That
RJ> used to  be a common subject for discussion around here when talking
RJ> about different compilers.  Last one I remember was 
RJ> something absurdly toward the big side,  like 150k bytes or 
RJ> so?  But this was years ago...

NH> Those discussions never included such things as debug vs. release 
NH> builds 

Sure they did.  That's one of the few specific things I remember about 'em,
 and that "including debugging information" was a primary reason
why stuff got really seriously bloated...

NH> or MSVC 

???

NH> being statically vs. dynamically linked.

That's a term I've run into since I've been running linux,  so I have at
least some idea of what it means,  though not too much of how you'd program
(or link?) for it.

NH> A release build which is dynamically linked can be _really_ small 
NH> (well, considering that it's GUI).

I'm pretty sure that's one of the ways that linux manages to be so
efficient,  though I suspect that some of those executables could be
stripped a bit more...

Fortunately for me I can do that to just the executables (though I'm a bit
fuzzy as to just how at the moment).  Unfortunately going to far with that
can also make dynamically linked stuff not work.    I'll get the
hang of it sooner or later.  Right now I'm chasing down other issues.

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