recent FPC versions generate smaller compiled files!
lazarus / 8-Other

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Giuseppe Ridinò · 2004-10-14 13:39

In the last period I've been upgrading lazarus and FPC every time it
was necessary.  
In one of these occasions, when upgrading FPC 1.9.4 to the most recent
beta release, I noted an interesting thing:
a Lazarus project compiled with the new compiler had about 10% (more
or less) size saved! For example from 1.49M with old FPC to 1.35M with
newer FPC.  :shock:
I can not actually provide detailed info about which beta version (or
snapview?!) of FPC has given such results,... but I could verify if
necessary.
Did someone else noted such behaviour?

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Anonymous · 2005-05-17 23:26

Yes and also on non-LCL projects, you may notice a smaller size with
an older compiler like 1.0.6 ..But then on older compilers you
wouldn't get dynamic arrays or other features, and the older compilers
are not maintained by FPC team (so if you have a bug, this will not
help if using an older compiler).

It's most likely due to compiler versions having different
optomizations ..even a newer compiler may have less initialization
than the last one, so smaller exe size. Then next compiler they add
some more initialization stuff or optomization and it changes again.

If you are in a tight situation though where say you were compiling
for use on a palm pilot or a small tablet computer it might make that
extra difference.. or for CGI applications that are very simple, if
you don't have much server space.  But not the best bet if you do have
that extra space, just go ahead and use the newest stable compiler if
you can afford to.

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Anonymous · 2005-05-20 17:24

I heard that ldw.exe is broken we probably should wait for correct
version.