How to achieve smaller size of the executable?

Question

Very recently I have come back to Delphi after a long pause and written a rather straightforward utility app my client requested to support an older release...

I kno

Answer 1

MapFileStats (DelphiTools.info) is a good (free) tool that allows you to see how much space every unit occupies in your executable. My own tool DelphiUnitSizes is an alternative that in addition to unit sizes also display the size of each function or class.

Delphi 2010 made the default executable about 30% larger, probably because of RTTI included in the RTL/VCL units, so you can use an older version of Delphi for smaller exe-size.

As others have mentioned UPX is a great tool too, the false positives by virusscanners are not that frequent in my experience.

The size of Delphi-executables can be very much trimmed down using custom System-units and UPX-compression. I can generate exe-files that are less that 64kb in size with my Delphi-based game-generator ZGameEditor, even with Delphi Berlin.