1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
|
+++
title = 'How big is "Hello, world?"'
lang = "en"
[taxonomies]
authors = ["harald"]
tags = ["programming", "rust", "c++", "d"]
[extra]
+++
## Rust
I accidentally got an extra day off from work, so then I figured I could have a
go at some initial dabblings in [Rust]. I haven't had time to play with
this language at all yet, but skimming through the tutorial online a while ago
got me interested. So off I went and wrote the mandatory intro-program:
"Hello, world!"
```rust
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}
```
<!-- more -->
Nice and easy, and running the rust compiler gives me an executable I can run right away:
```
$ rustc hello.rs
$ ./hello
Hello, world!
$ ls -l
total 428
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 430656 Mar 19 13:27 hello
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 45 Mar 19 10:18 hello.rs
```
Whoa! What's that, a minimalist hello world program takes about 430kB? Sounds excessive, but to be frank I didn't have anything to compare with, so let's see how some other common languages fare.
## C++
C++ is mature and has a long history. Together with it's parent C and grandparent FORTRAN, this is pretty much where the art of compiler writing has been developed and fine tuned. I would expect this to fare really well, so let's see how it checks out:
```cpp
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl;
}
```
Compiling and checking with both gcc and clang:
```
$ g++ -o hello-g++ hello.cpp
$ clang++ -o hello-clang++ hello.cpp
$ ./hello-g++
Hello, world!
$ ./hello-clang++
Hello, world!
$ ls -l
total 28
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 8416 Mar 19 13:34 hello-clang++
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 83 Mar 19 10:23 hello.cpp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 8424 Mar 19 13:34 hello-g++
```
Pretty much exactly the same size for both. Definitely a lot better. Still a tad large for such a minimalist program, I think.
## D
Another language I have found interresting for quite a while is [D]. I have never really had the time to play with it though. At least nothing beyond the simple hello world type of programs. However reading about the language design, and following its development, I think it looks very promising.
```d
import std.stdio;
void main()
{
writeln("Hello, world!");
}
```
Here we have three choices for the compiler, the official [dmd], [ldc] using llvm as a backend, and [gdc] built on the Gnu Compiler Collection:
```
$ dmd -ofhello-dmd hello.d
$ ldc2 -ofhello-ldc2 hello.d
$ gdc -o hello-gdc hello.d
$ ./hello-dmd
Hello, world!
$ ./hello-ldc2
Hello, world!
$ ./hello-gdc
Hello, world!
$ ls -l
total 3172
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 65 Mar 19 13:39 hello.d
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 533080 Mar 19 14:39 hello-dmd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 2689880 Mar 19 15:23 hello-gdc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 12712 Mar 19 14:08 hello-ldc2
```
Interesting!
[gdc] produces an absolutely humongous executable. 2.7MB for a simple hello world is clearly out of line!
On the other hand [dmd] produces an executable in line with our original samle
in Rust, 530kB. The winner is clearly [ldc] which gets away with 13kB. That's
almost in line with the C++ version, even if it's about twice as large.
The object files may be more interesting in this case:
```
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 39512 Mar 19 15:31 hello-dmd.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 21936 Mar 19 15:29 hello-gdc.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 12384 Mar 19 15:30 hello-ldc2.o
```
They are much more comparable. The dmd-produced object file is still three times as large as the one produced by ldc, but it's less than a tenth of the complete executable. Also gdc plots itself nicely in the middle.
My suspicion is that the rest of the executable in the gdc and dmd case is the full runtime library. On the other hand ldc produces an executable only slightly larger than the object file, which indicates it only links in the parts of the runtime that it needs. Why the huge difference between the executables produced by gdc and dmd, I do not know. If the object files was any indication, I would expect the relationship to be the other way around.
## Assembler
Just for comparison I also did a take a small hello world in assembler:
```asm
use64
stdout equ 1
syscall_write equ 1
syscall_exit equ 60
section .data
hello db 'Hello, world!', 10
hello_len equ $-hello
section .text
global _start
_start:
mov rax, syscall_write
mov rdi, stdout
mov rsi, hello
mov rdx, hello_len
syscall
mov rax, syscall_exit
mov rdi, 0
syscall
```
I used nasm to assemble this:
```
$ nasm -f elf64 -o hello.o hello.asm
$ ld -o hello hello.o
$ ./hello
Hello, world!
$ ls -l
total 12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rabalder rabalder 1064 Mar 19 14:47 hello
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 491 Mar 19 12:40 hello.asm
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 992 Mar 19 14:46 hello.o
```
Here we end up with an executable of about 1kB. My first attempt was actually about half that size again. I accidentally stripped away unused symbols that the linker includes by default. However, since I've done no optimizations in the other cases I found that to be a bit unfair. Still this is quite minimal compared to the other examples.
## Conclusion
So why do the different languages and compilers produce so wildly different executables for the same program?
For the really big deviations we see with Rust and D compiled with gdc or dmd I am certain that the result is caused by including the full runtime library in the executable. There's probably ways to strip out what's not being used, which would reduce the size considerable for all of these cases. I have not explored how to do this.
Looking at the object files produced from the actual source files seems to be a lot more predictable across languages and compilers. While the executable is meant to be a complete and standalone entity, something you can just run. The object file represents the actual machine code produced directly from the source. This means that the executable must include any supporting code that is needed during runtime. This part can vary significantly from one language to another.
In fact, producing the object file from Rust, we see the following:
```
$ rustc --emit obj hello.rs
$ ls -l hello.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 3696 Mar 19 14:56 hello.o
```
The object file is only 3.7kB. That's one third of the code produced by ldc again. Also for C++ the object files differ significantly from the finished executable:
```
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 2656 Mar 19 16:05 hello-g++.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rabalder rabalder 2856 Mar 19 16:08 hello-clang++.o
```
With this comparison, it seems the Rust compiler is quite comparable to the code produced by the much more mature and state of the art compilers for C++.
Anyways, this is a detour, and not an attempt to compare which language or compiler is better in any way. This is far from any real world scenario, and for more complex programs you may get completely different results.
I have specifically not done any optimization of the linker stage. I wanted to see the difference between how the different languages compilers produced the resulting executable with the default settings.
Further, comparing a very young language like Rust, that's still very much evolving, to some of the most mature toolchains there is will never be a fair comparison. Even if D is quite a bit older, it is also a language that still evolves rapidly. For both of these languages, I expect that as both the languages and tools mature they will become more comparable both to C++ and to each other.
Even with all of the caveats above, I found this exercise quite interesting. I hope you did too.
[Rust]: http://www.rust-lang.org/
[D]: http://dlang.org/
[dmd]: http://dlang.org/download.html
[ldc]: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases
[gdc]: http://gdcproject.org/downloads
|
