Yeah, but the VB executables themselves were tiny (in P-Code form, which was the default, they were also much more compact than machine code) and while a single exe+runtime itself was larger than the ~300K a minimum that Delphi 2/C++ Builder would produce (with +~100K for a program that did something interesting), it would take 3-4 programs sharing the runtime to quickly win that difference back.

This is actually a (minor) issue i have with Lazarus - the executable files do not depend on anything, but they are too large (~2MB minimum nowadays, if you remove all debug info, etc) so if i want to create several "small" utilities that focus on one thing instead of a multi-tool, i waste a lot of space (and most importantly nowadays, bandwidth).

At least with Delphi you can compile the executable with the runtime library as a separate file to be shared among the programs (my guess is that they wanted to do something the VB shared runtime, but it didn't seem to catch on as nobody used it like that).

> the VB executables themselves were tiny (in P-Code form, which was the default, they were also much more compact than machine code)

Now that you mention and I think about it, as VB was compiled to the p-code and depended on the big common runtime which executed it, it can be seen as one Windows-specific spiritual precursor of... Java.

Yeah, actually Microsoft used P-Code way before VB1 - AFAIK their C compiler was able to emit it and several of their products were compiled as P-Code instead of machine code, which helped to save disk space (a premium at the time, especially considering it could make a difference on how many floppy disks they shipped) and quickly port their applications to other emerging platforms at the time (like the Macintosh).

Both Microsoft's P-Code and Java were really inspired by UCSD Pascal which only emitted P-Code to be executed by a runtime they implemented quickly in a lot of systems (including the original IBM PC).

> Both Microsoft's P-Code and Java were really inspired by UCSD Pascal which only emitted P-Code

Yes, and I've actually experimented with UCSD Pascal on a 8-bit machine (Apple II). Turbo Pascal was, of course, much faster on it (using Z-80 card).