The 100 line hack I used was to noop out the `.idata` section which link.exe refused to merge/shrink, that only saved me 1Kb in the end.
Looking at the section info of the zig exe it looks like there is some black magic going on with it's alignment so I may have to dig deeper to see what zig is doing here. Also thank you both for pointing zig out, I haven't heard of it until now and it may come in handy for something else I'm planning on making :)
std/debug.zig:
pub fn print(comptime fmt: []const u8, args: anytype) void {
const held = stderr_mutex.acquire();
defer held.release();
const stderr = io.getStdErr().writer();
nosuspend stderr.print(fmt, args) catch return;
}
pub fn print(self: Self, comptime format: []const u8, args: anytype) Error!void {
return std.fmt.format(self, format, args);
}
pub fn format(
writer: anytype,
comptime fmt: []const u8,
args: anytype,
) !void {
...
I didn't actually check the zig std source. I was referring to what I was seeing in radare2 :)
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#comptime
See an example calling firstNPrimes. "When we compile this program, Zig generates the constants with the answer pre-computed." "Note that we did not have to do anything special with the syntax of these functions. For example, we could call the sum function as is with a slice of numbers whose length and values were only known at run-time."
Then see "Case Study: printf in Zig"
zig build-exe hello.zig -O ReleaseSmall --strip --single-threaded -target x86_64-windows
Resulting hello.exe is 3072 bytes. From these 2560 are zero bytes. The only system calls from the resulting binary are to ExitProcess, GetLastError and WriteFile from KERNEL32.dll Additionally, changing the release optimizations:
zig build-exe hello.zig -O ReleaseFast --single-threaded --strip -target x86_64-windows
produces hello.exe of 2560 bytes, 1849 from which are zeroes.
Note all: winter_blue has right to mention Zig. It's about what's provided out of the box in that new language and the provided optimizations are really effective.
Edit: asking mcountryman to explain: "the compiled rust exe has 480 non-zero bytes" -- I think you mean not just "compiled" but "hand-optimized writing hundreds of lines of the rust source code and not using standard library"? https://github.com/mcountryman/min-sized-rust-windows/blob/m... https://github.com/mcountryman/min-sized-rust-windows/blob/m...
Edit2: Please note that zig doesn't eventually link to printf and libc there, but links and resolves the std calls from the source to the calls to KERNEL32.dll.