🚀 go-pugleaf

mg@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Michael Golan) writes:
>boyd_m@intertel.UUCP (Mark Boyd) writes:
>>   Microsoft C 5.1 .EXE:  720672 bytes
>>       Borland C++ .EXE:  842848 bytes
>
>Ok guys, anyone care to comment?

Um, I may have a vested interest in the results coming out one way
rather than the other, but aside from that I would like to point out
that the size of the EXE file is not a good measure of the compiler
optimization. Is there any debugging info in there? Are the two
linkers making the same decisions as to when not to take up space in
the exe file for uninitialized data? The Microsoft linker does fixup
threading and the Borland linker does not, and the two linkers make
different assumptions about segment alignment, both of which affect
the exe size without affecting the executable image. Also, how much of
the executable is a result of the run time library, and how much is
output of the compiler?

If you really want to compare the outputs of the compiler by size (and
not speed) you should get detailed link maps and compare those. By the
way, from what I've seen, any fair comparison will show that Microsoft
C has much better code optimization, especially for loop optimization
and integer arithmetic, and Borland C++ has a much faster and tighter
RTL and floating point processing. So if execution speed is your main
consideration, you can choose one or the other depending on how much
of your program time is spent in your code or in library routines.

  -- sidney markowitz <sidney@borland.com>
     Borland International (Languages - R&D)