/nim-bin-size

Measuring the size of Nim hello-world executables. This repo was created mainly as a citation for https://nim-lang.org/blog/2022/12/21/version-20-rc.html

Primary LanguageNimMIT LicenseMIT

Nim binary size

"Hello, World!" binary size in Nim.

Instructions

Run

nim c -r build.nim

which compiles the Nim program

echo "Hello, World!"

with various sets of compilation options.

Results

-d:release1 LTO2 strip3 --opt:size4 statically link Linux macOS Windows
98.2 KiB 109.4 KiB 188.7 KiB
✔️ 67.3 KiB 71.7 KiB 151.5 KiB
✔️ ✔️ 39.5 KiB 67.6 KiB 132.0 KiB
✔️ ✔️ ✔️ 34.5 KiB 65.1 KiB 79.5 KiB
✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ 26.5 KiB 49.1 KiB 64.0 KiB
✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ via musl-gcc5 30.0 KiB
✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ via musl-clang6 30.0 KiB
✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ via zig cc7 6.1 KiB

Details

All results from 2023-03-31 on x86_64 with Nim 2.0 nightly release 2023-03-30 (corresponding to a Nim compiler built from commit nim-lang/Nim@2e4ba4a).

Linux

  • Arch Linux
  • glibc 2.37
  • gcc 12.2.1
  • clang 15.0.7
  • musl 1.2.3
  • zig 0.10.1

macOS

  • macOS 12
  • clang 14.0.0

Windows

  • Windows Server 2022
  • Mingw-w64 11.2.0

Footnotes

  1. Perform a release build: -d:release (the default is a debug build) ↩

  2. Enable Link-Time Optimization: --passC:-flto --passL:-flto ↩

  3. Remove debug symbols: --passL:-s ↩

  4. Optimize for reduced binary size: --opt:size (the default is --opt:speed) ↩

  5. Add --cc:gcc --gcc.exe:musl-gcc --gcc.linkerexe:musl-gcc --passL:-static ↩

  6. Add --cc:clang --clang.exe:musl-clang --clang.linkerexe:musl-clang --passL:-static ↩

  7. Add --panics:on -d:useMalloc --os:any -d:posix -d:noSignalHandler --cc=clang --clang.exe='zigcc' --clang.linkerexe='zigcc' --passC:'-target x86_64-linux-musl' --passL:'-target x86_64-linux-musl' ↩