Small is beautiful

Posted by ALB42 on 7. Januar 2017No Comments

Something really awesome is going on in the Amiga Freepascal world. ChainQ is working together with Frank Wille (the Author of vbcc) to optimize the size of executables created by freepascal compiler. Some things had to be included to freepascal and vasm (the Assembler) and vlink (the Linker) had to be adjusted to freepascal, hence you need the latest nightly to test this. The result is truly remarkable.
Just as an example, I compiled the MUI-Demo from the muihelper session.
With LD it has 321k with the new section linking it has around 50k and of course it still work.

The original binary MUI Demo is around 25k, the difference should be the RTL which needs a little bit space, but also delivers more convenience and securtiy features for the coder (like string handling, memory management and helper functions)

We use the vlink a while already on Amiga m68k because it’s much faster and do not depend on ixemul.library. Now it also creates much smaller files. So no reason to keep the old GNU ld and with the vasm we also do not need the GNU as anymore, so in principle both ixemul.library dependencies are gone. I will test that a while expecially also with LCL applications, they are huge now, I’m curious how somall they can become.

If you would like to test download a current nightly for m68k-amiga. I included the vasm and vlink already and also activated it as default.

The same thing should be also working for MorphOS, this I will try soon, so stay connected.

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