Profiling DLL/LIB Bloat

Question

I\'ve inherited a fairly large C++ project in VS2005 which compiles to a DLL of about 5MB. I\'d like to cut down the size of the library so it loads faster over the network

Answer 1

All good suggestions. What I do is get the map file and then just eyeball it. The kind of thing I've found in the past is that a large part of the space is taken by one or more class libraries brought in by the fact that some variable somewhere was declared as having a type that sounded like it would save some coding effort but wasn't really necessary.

Like in MFC (remember that?) they have a wrapper class to go around every thing like controls, fonts, etc. that Win32 provides. Those take a ton of space and you don't always need them.

Another thing that can take a ton of space is collection classes you could manage without. Another is cout I/O routines you don't use.