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bart (450)

bart
  bart.lateur@pandora.be

Journal of bart (450)

Sunday February 19, 2006
05:14 AM

PXPerl + MinGW: the DLL files are too big

[ #28730 ]

Eek. I hate this. It's one of the reasons why I dispise working with C.

The DLLs built with PXPerl+MinGW are just too big. I tried this code:

use Inline C => <<'END_OF_C_CODE';
 
END_OF_C_CODE

That's right, an empty library, and the resulting DLL was a whopping 249k!

Urgh, not that nightmare again...

So I checked more DLLs includes with the distribution, and those built by MinGW, and the latter are all huge. For example, the DLL for HTML::Parser that comes in the distro, version 3.45, is 60kB... the one built with MinGW, using

test GAAS/HTML-Parser-3.45.tar.gz

in the CPAN shell, is 347kB!!!

WTF is all this junk, and is it possible to make this much smaller?


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  • Scanning the web a little, plus my previous (bad) experiences with C compilers, made me look up a "strip" option, to "remove (debugging) symbols from the executables". I found that for MinGW, I need the -s [spacejack.org] flag.

    So I edited the "linker flags for DLLs", from

    -mdll

    to

    -mdll -s

    (For this, you have to run configure_pxperl.)

    Now, the HTML::Parser DLL is reduced to 40k (yay! I never expected it to work so well!), and the empty Inline DLL is 7k. Great.

    This should be a standard enabled option in PXPerl's configurat

  • I just checked, and VanillaPerl [sourceforge.net], which is built with mingw using perl5.8.8's win32/Makefile, has this option on by default.

    I downloaded and built HTML-Parser v3.45; the dll is 38.5kB.

    • Thanks for pointing me to VanillaPerl, I hadn't heard of it before. Well, seen it has had only 7 downloads until today, I think I'm not the only one. But it looks promising. A MinGW compiled perl that includes the compiler it was built with, is always very interesting.

      So CamelPack is a SourceForge project now, is it? Nice. And VanillaPerl is part of the grand project. Also nice.

      I am still planning on pushing forward with this PXPerl+MinGW combination. If I don't, it looks like nobody will. And that would be
      • PXPerl definitely has a different target 'audience' than VanillaPerl, which was just put together for Adam Kennedy's recent beer challenge; it's just the core modules; so it won't meet everyone's requirements.

        I'm currently just sending as many rt.cpan bug reports as I can, with the hope of getting as many modules as possible working on windows with cpan.pm, rather than start maintaining yet-another perl distro.
    • Off topic I know but: Any ideas on how to use MinGW and dmake to compile Apache under Windows?

      ron@savage.net.au
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