https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

programming in the
twenty-first century

It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to
implement your ideas.

Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than

Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS was released in September 1986. Being
version 3, there were lesser releases prior to it and flashier ones
after, but 3 was a solid representation of the Turbo Pascal
experience: a full Pascal compiler, including extensions that it made
it practical for commercial use, tightly integrated with an editor.
And the whole thing was lightning fast, orders of magnitude faster at
building projects than Microsoft's compilers.

The entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was
39,731 bytes. How does that stack up in 2011 terms? Here are some
things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than, as of October 30, 2011:

The minified version of jquery 1.6 (90,518 bytes).

The yahoo.com home page (219,583 bytes).

The image of the white iPhone 4S at apple.com (190,157 bytes).

zlib.h in the Mac OS X Lion SDK (80,504 bytes).

The touch command under OS X Lion (44,016 bytes).

Various vim quick reference cards as PDFs. (This one is 47,508
bytes.)

The compiled code for the Erlang R14B02 parser (erl_parse.beam,
286,324 bytes).

The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes).

(If you liked this, you might like A Personal History of Compilation
Speed.)

permalink October 30, 2011

previously

  * Starting in the Middle
  * Papers from the Lost Culture of Array Languages
  * The Revolution is Personal
  * Optimization on a Galactic Scale
  * Greetings from the Bottom of the Benchmarks

archives

twitter / mail

I'm James Hague, a recovering programmer who has been designing video
games since the 1980s. Programming Without Being Obsessed With
Programming and Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry are
good starting points. For the older stuff, try the 2012 Retrospective
.

Where are the comments?