EXE file size

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <4302 at sactoh0.SAC.CA.US> jak at sactoh0.SAC.CA.US (Jay A. Konigsberg) writes:
>I have wondered the same thing. Mainly, why are C exectuables so large.
>foo.c       11
>foo.o      256 
>foo       4815

The executable contains a run-time startoff module (crt0.o), plus some
library functions needed by crt0.o, such as exit().  Clever C library
implementations are able to arrange that the stdio overhead normally
needed to support exit() is not linked in when stdio functions are not
invoked directly by the application; otherwise, there would also be
all the static _iob structs and the code for fclose(), fflush(), etc.
crt0.o also is responsible for collecting environment variables and
program arguments so that they can be passed to main() etc.