Why is this one line program SOOOO LOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG?

[sramtrc at windy.dsir.govt.nz]

I can write a short program using THINK C that takes up less than 1K of disk
space. That 1K program runs fine under A/UX. Yet if I compile and link that
program under A/UX for MacOS the program is 115K long. And it does exactly
the same thing as the 1K program. 

Why does it take 114 K of code to get a 1K (actually the code of the actual
program can be just a few lines of assembler) program running? Is a copy
of launch built in with it as well?

The REAL question is: Can I pluck out the few bytes that do the work and 
stick them into a new file 1K long that runs just like the THINK version
of the program? I would have to pluck out the program code and the libmac.a
code that was in with it. Then stick all that into an "a.out" shell or 
whatever the MacOS equivalent to COFF is.

Do I hear you say that THINK C strips its executables? OK so when I strip
my A/UX program it goes down to 75K. Still a huge amount of stuff. I can
reduce it to 45K using shared libraries but THINK C doesn't use shared
libraries so that's not a valid comparison.

It makes sense to not distribute complete applications written under A/UX
for MacOS using electronic methods. If you send out a 15K program you would
also have to send 45K of stuff that everyone has anyway. Better to just
send the 15K object file and let users link it themselves.

This is not an important issue. I'm just curious what all that extra
baggage is. And since it is unnecessary I would like to see it "unlinked"
from my program and just temporarily used at runtime or something. I wonder
if I can make a shared library out of it.

I have written a utility (it's for MacOS running on top of UNIX only - it
uses MacOS and A/UX calls all over the place). It is 15K long and compresses
into 7K - small enough to post as a message in this newsgroup. But not
small enough if I include the baggage. So I was wondering whether or not
to post the whole application or just the object file.

Cheers,
Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz

I wonder how you write a setuid INIT or FKEY or whatever. Maybe the init
would just do one thing - exec a setuid program. Hmmmm. If the program
the INIT exec'ed was an A/UX program the one line INIT would be longer than
the program it exec'ed.

PS I hope Apple have a good upgrade policy for owners of earliers versions
of that X stuff. Like I hope that the upgrade 2.0 -> 2.01 is inexpensive.