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A comment on Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes? by vinayan3 on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:27PM (#14144704)
It takes a bit of engineering to cut binary sizes down. It depends on how much they care and the cost they incur by having larger binaries. With building mobile apps you get a prebuilt XCode project and it takes a lot of effort to tinker with it to reduce binary size.
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Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes? by Tanegashima on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @11:02AM (#14148198)
I understand that.

But how could the executables? You know, the machine code, get so big.

And I'm comparing installers with just the app!

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Re:Ask HN: What happened to binary sizes? by vinayan3 on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @03:24PM (#14150903)
The machine code can be so big because people put huge strings as constants. As I mentioned cutting down binary size comes from working on the code and understand how the complier translate it into machine codes. The compiler could unravel a loop, inline functions, etc... The compiler is making decisions about binary size vs speed for you. There are ways to tell it not to do that.
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