On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Eric Dahlman wrote:
[...]
> My point was that if you are making these sorts of comparisons you
> cannot just *ignore* the runtime in the C/C++ case and more importantly
> that C and O'Caml are not fundamentally different in this regard.  By
> definition it is impossible to write a program in C or C++ which does
> not use the respective runtime, it cannot be ignored.

Hmm, you're right.

I had confused myself, I guess, by absorbing the widespread use of "C
runtime" to mean MSVCRT.DLL (or libc.so, or whatever).

[...]
> the setting up the initial environment.  In the case of gcc this is
> captured in three files which a linked with each C program.  They are
>
> crtbegin.o 1.6k
> crtend.o   1.2k
> libgcc.a  46.3k
>
> So it would be reasonable to say that the C runtime is 49k.
>
> Now in the case of O'Caml I don't know what the exact numbers are but
> the ZINC interpreter is on the order of 75k and that includes the ocaml
> runtime. So they are really similar, really the only big difference in
> runtime requirements for OCaml is the garbage collector.
[...]

OK.  Getting back to the original question again (how to reduce data to be
transferred over the network), both O'Caml and C statically link this
runtime stuff, right?  So, why is O'Caml's "hello world" (compressed) 45k,
to C's 1 or 2k?  Is that 43k the garbage collector?  Or is it mostly that
O'Caml, in contrast to C, is linking in a bunch of stuff from its standard
library that isn't strictly required for "hello world"?  Or something else
again??

Hope I'm not going round in circles here...


John

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