macOS SDL app file size

[Muncher]

I recently made a demo of a water-sim in C with SDL. When I compiled the program, removed unnecessary files, and ran it through xslimmer, i still had a 28KB app. I realize 4KB comes from info.plist, but why does 7KB of code take 24KB of space?! Can I reduce this any further?

The reason I'm so obsessive about space comes from the time I've spent programming for microcontrollers. Also, I might try to make a 64kb intro for mac (not a port!) if I can get these apps smaller.

 

[admanimal]

Have you actually opened up the .app bundle and looked at what is inside? There are a number of other files that could be in there taking up space.

 

[Muncher]

Have you actually opened up the .app bundle and looked at what is inside? There are a number of other files that could be in there taking up space.

Yeah, the SDL library takes up almost 1.5MB, and then there are other unused files.

 

[iSee]

I don't know, but here's the mach-o file format reference:

http://developer.apple.com/document...ceptual/MachORuntime/Reference/reference.html

Knock yourself out!

Maybe someone has created a high-level mach-o format browser. If not, maybe it will be easy enough to analyze your simple app with just a hex editor and the reference.

 

[sord]

24KB, or 24MB?

 

[Muncher]

24KB, or 24MB?

kilobytes. I know, I know, modern computers and all that. I want a 10K file max, and for how much I wrote, that's not asking much.

 

[Muncher]

Hah, I finally got it. I am using iPakk, a command-line tool for packing executables, and I'm not using SDL anymore, but OGL directly, which cuts down on usage. I got everything down to under 8Kb, and the compression ratio will probably get better as I add more stuff to it.

 

[lee1210]

In another thread we were working on an assembly hello world program. The object file was 364 bytes. 137 of them were non-null. Once it was linked, the resulting file was 8248 bytes. 236 of them were non-null. As was recommended above, hacking on the mach-o format is probably going to be your only way to go. If printing "Hello World!" and returning 0 takes 8248 bytes after linking, you only have 1992 bytes left to play with to do anything useful without playing with the format of the binary yourself. There may be a "cheaper" linker that will optimize for you, but I'm not familiar with anything like that.

Edit: Too slow, looks like you found something to do the hard hacking for you.

 

[lee1210]

I am admittedly unfamiliar with executable packing, but this did trim the hello world program down to 3071 bytes, 2414 of which were non-null. Certainly interesting. At least you have some extra bytes to play with now, good luck.

-Lee