AutoHotkey Community

That's a great article. I've often wondered about the code size differences among compilers, so it's good to hear that MSVC++ 7.1 (which I currently use) excels in this area.

Their conclusion that the Intel C++ compiler performs "streets ahead of the rest" leads me to try to compile AHK with it someday and benchmark/compare. If anyone has compiled AHK on the Intel C++ compiler (or is willing to try), please let me know.

Zuh? Did you strip the exes after they were compiled? Did you generate debug info? I've always found that gcc produces smaller than binaries than vc6. If you're comparing to a release build than you should strip debug symbols with gcc -s binary.exe first.

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<enormous animated gif>

No, I just imported the VC++ project in the IDEs (Dev-CPP and Code::Blocks), supposing they would do such job by themselves in release mode.
gt2 tells me that "Line numbers stripped from file, Local symbols stripped from file, Debugging information is stored separately in a .dbg file" in the DLL I made.
gcc -s doesn't work on my gcc version (3.4.2) but there is a strip.exe utility with it. Running strip on SciLexer.dll shrinked down the file from more than 800KB to 640KB, which is much better, but still bigger than the 456KB file produced by VC++6.
The mentioned Dr.Dobbs' article seems to validate this feeling, as GCC is reported to produce the bigger and slower binaries.

@Chris: Intel C++ compiler has always been hailed as being the best, which is understandable as its job is to produce bytes to be crunched by the processor they make...
Alas, it is not free (except on Linux, it seems), and I can't afford to buy software nowadays.
Digital Mars has good figures, I downloaded it some months ago, I should try and install it. It is often forgotten when people mention free compilers, perhaps because it has limited capabilities some years ago. According the the article, it is now in par with the best compilers.

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vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

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