Why is GNU/Linux so Bloated?

[Shlomi Fish]

On Thursday 25 June 2009 16:52:11 Baruch Siach wrote:
> Hi Shlomi,
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 04:20:00PM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Replying to myself, I'd like to note that I recently fixed some build
> > problems in the Freecell Solver distribution, and after I was through,
> > MSVC now generates a larger .dll file, comparable in size to the gcc -Os
> > one - i.e: 40K-50K. I guess it previously wasn't built correctly.
>
> Care to elaborate on those build problems? What build option caused the
> binary size bloat?
>

Actually, it is the other way around. Some build issues caused MSVC to 
generate much smaller (and probably mal-functioning) binaries. I fixed several 
problems now that caused it to fail in the 2.32.0 release. However, with a 
previous release, the build did not fail (but generated the small binaries). 
The NEWS file for 2.32.1 reads:

{{{{{
Version 2.32.1: (25-Jun-2009)
-----------------------------

1. Added a "#define BUILDING_DLL 1" so fcs_dllexport.h will work fine on
Microsoft Visual C++.

2. Normalised the DLLEXPORT modifiers.

3. Some fixes to the CMake build system: 
    - CHECK_C_COMPILER_FLAG now uses a different variable for each flag,
    since the variable was cached.
    - tcmalloc is now truly optional.

4. Moved the declaration of the strncasecmp(a,b,c) macro for WIN32 systems
to before its first use.

5. All of this was done to fix many build/compilation problems.
}}}}}

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> baruch

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Optimizing Code for Speed - http://xrl.us/begfgk

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