
Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011) - chj
http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
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gilgoomesh
I think this is a little misleading since I don't think version 3 really was a
"solid representation of the Turbo Pascal experience". Version 3 was pretty
feature poor: no step through debugger, no pull-down menus in the IDE, etc.
It's was just a bare-bones console editor and a COM-only compiler.

It was the blue-background versions of the IDE that most people remember as
"Turbo Pascal". That started with version 5. These versions were more than 10
times the size of Turbo Pascal 3. 548.64 kB for version 5 and nearly double
that again for version 5.5.

500kB is still pretty small by modern standards but don't be thinking that
everything you might associate with "Turbo Pascal" fit into 39,731 bytes.

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agumonkey
I think I have TP7 on a disk, the whole distribution (all exes, ide, compiler,
utils) is around 800kB.

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forinti
I used Acornsoft ISO Pascal on a BBC Micro. It came in two 16KB ROMs. These
included an editor.

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JetSpiegel
Ironically, I opened about 10 tabs of this site, which lead to using 1 Turbo
Pascal worth of bandwidth in a few seconds.

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pls2halp
There's also
[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)
complaining about bloat in file sizes.

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oceanswave
The entire Super Mario Bros game for the NES is 31kb for comparison

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mivanchev
This one never gets old! While it's debatable whether it makes a whole lot of
sense to compare compiled code to (completely) unrelated things, it's pretty
shocking that touch on Mac OS Lion is that large in size (haven't verified
myself though). Perhaps someone could quickly explain how that particular
version of touch operates.

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gilgoomesh
touch in macOS Sierra is down to 23kB since the 32-bit version is no longer
part of the binary.

If you open it up, it's about 2/3rds zeros, maybe 10% Apple signing
certificate, a whole bunch of dynamic linking data and according to otool, the
(__TEXT,__text) section – normal code – is a mere 3kb in size.

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yjftsjthsd-h
Why all the 0s? Required padding?

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fancy_pantser
Mach-O files are usually padded to 4096 byte aligned segments. You can inspect
the segments with otool, pagestuff, and nm.

NB: UPX compresses it from 23312 -> 12904 bytes (55.35%) using UCL.

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nine_k
Pascal as a language was designed, among other things, to be very easy to
compile. I believe that most of the time you don't even need to build an AST,
for instance. Unless you try to optimize the result seriously, it must be
reasonably easy to write a very compact and resource-economical Pascal
compiler.

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flavio81
They are not comparing to meaningful things like other Pascal, Algol, Go, or C
compilers. Which would be a relevant comparison.

They are comparing to meaningless stuff like an iPhone picture (!)

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ngcc_hk
Still trying to find the Turbo Pascal source of the Turbo Bridge after all
these years.

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codewritinfool
What is Turbo Bridge?

