How to reduce the size of executable produced by MinGW g++ compiler?

Question

I have a trivial \"Hello world\" C++ program that is compiled to 500kB executable by MinGW g++ compiler under Win XP. Some say that is caused by iostream li

Answer 1

Flags to use:

• -s like you've been doing to strip symbols
• -lstdc++_s to specify dynamically linking against the libstdc++.dll
• -Os to optimize the binary for size.

By default mingw static links to libstdc++.a on Windows.

Note that the lstdc++_s flag is only in MinGW with GCC > 4.4, I believe.