GCC C++ “Hello World” program -> .exe is 500kb big when compiled on Windows. How can I reduce its size?

Question

I just recently started learning C++ - I am using nuwen\'s version of MingW on Windows, using NetBeans as an IDE (I have also MSDN AA Version of MSVC 2008, though I don\'t u

Answer 1

Basically, there's not really anything you can do to reduce that .exe size with a base distribution of mingw. 550kb is about as small as you can get it, because mingw and gcc/g++ in general are bad at stripping unused functions. About 530kb of that is from the msvcrt.a library.

If you really wanted to get into it, you might be able to rebuild the msvcrt.a library with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections compiler options, and then use the -Wl,--gc-sections linker options when linking your app, and this should be able to strip a lot of that stuff out of there. But if you're just learning C++, rebuilding that library may be a bit advanced.

Or you could just use MSVC, which is great at stripping unused functions. That same bit of code compiled with MSVC produces a 10kb exe.