SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Wed Aug 22 22:04:59 2001

It was thus said that the Great Chuck McManis once stated:
>
> At 09:37 PM 8/22/01 -0400, Sean wrote:
> > I just compiled the C hello world program under Linux 2.2.12 with
> >egcs-2.91.66 and got the following:
> >-rwxrwxr-x 1 spc spc 932131 Aug 22 21:32 hello
> > Okay, granted, I compiled it statically (if I compiled normally, it would
> >be 11,811 bytes in size 8-) but still, nearly a megabyte there!
>
> So what's your point? How much memory do you have on this machine? What
> fraction of main memory is 932,131 bytes? Given dynamic linking, what
> fraction is 11,811 bytes?

  Depending upon the system I run the executable on, 932,131 is anywhere
from 1/4 to 1/32 of the memory (my laptop running Linux has 4M of RAM, while
my main development machine has 32M RAM). I'll leave the 11,811 bytes as an
exercise 8-)

> Here's another test (which is actually useful.) compare the difference between
> main() {
> printf("Hello World.\n");
> }
>
> and
> main() {
> printf("Hello World.\n");
> }

  Is there a difference?

> or even more importantly
> main() {}
>
> What is the incremental cost of computation once you get into the game?

  I did

        #include <stdlib.h>

        int main(void) { return(EXIT_SUCCESS); } /* [1] */

  A static link made a binary of 435,031 bytes, and dynamically linking is
around 3k (using the default options). So that's the overhead (at least
under RedHat 5.2).

  -spc (Still a bit large to me ... )
  
[1] The smallest ANSI-C conformant program. I can't stand K&R C 8-)
Received on Wed Aug 22 2001 - 22:04:59 BST