Re: Trivial program size inflation

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Jul 02, 2023 at 01:49:57PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> Why?  If I'm looking at overhead size, I am most interested in just the
> overhead size, which is exactly what a no-op program gives.  If I want
> to look at the overhead of printf, or malloc, or something, I'd use a
> program that just calls those.  That might be interesting, but it's not
> what I was doing here.

I would define overhead as "anything that is not needed for what this
concrete program does" and that is always ~100% in your test, but gets
blurry quickly for all real programs.

With most real world programs (hopefully) nearly 100% of what you see
as overhead now is actually needed - and it still may be bigger than
what we hope for due to suboptimal modularization.

I am all for reducing sizes for real world things (linked either
dynamic or static) wherever possible, and I'm pretty sure NetBSD will
gladly accept patches to make them smaller if they are technically
sound and don't impact standards compliance.

Martin