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No argument from authority is needed. Anyone is free to download the disk images for a large body of software such as the same versions of Ubuntu or Fedora, an
by brucehoult 5y ago
No argument from authority is needed.
Anyone is free to download the disk images for a large body of software such as the same versions of Ubuntu or Fedora, and compare the binary sizes -- using the "text" output from "size" command, not raw disk files as there are also things such as debugging info in there.
Here's an example, using (ironically) the GMP library itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423324
Here we see riscv64 significantly smaller than the other 64 bit ISAs aarch64 (28.1%) and x86_64 (36.5%), and beaten by a smaller margin by 32 bit ARM Thumb2 (-17.0%)
Anyone can check the sizes of bash, perl, emacs ... whatever they want ... themselves, without relying on the word of anyone here.
- astrange 5y agoThat could be confounded by gcc not enabling -funroll-loops, alignment of branch targets, etc for some architectures.
- brucehoult 5y agoConceivably, different ISAs could have the code compiled with different size/performance tradeoffs. One assumes that the Ubuntu and Fedora etc people would make sensible choices, consistent across ISAs. I don't know any reason why they would both make the same bad choices (which by "bad" here I am talking about small code at the expense of speed). Gcc certainly supports unrolling, alignment of labels / loops / functions on all targets I'm aware of.