Why is ocaml so big?

Why is ocaml so big?

[Giles Constant]

Hiya,

I'm gradually falling in love with Ocaml, but my main hobby is writing demos, 
mainly in the 64k category.  Ocaml is a great way of writing small code, alas 
it comes with a zonking great lump of baggage :-)

"Hello world" written in ocaml and compiled with ocamlopt is 81K on my 32 bit 
linux box, which instantly rules it out.  (running it through upx packer, it 
comes out at 37k, which is still too high).

Are there any options which can strip this down to the bare minimum?  I'm 
guessing that much of the code in there is part of the garbage collection 
code, in which case, I'll have to give up, but it would be nice to use 
ocaml :-)

Thanks,

Giles

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Florent Monnier]

Hi Giles,
I understand your problem, I don't know if it is possible to make a custom 
version of ocamlopt, but one thing you could do would be to switch from 
native code to bytecode.
A "hello world" compiled with ocamlc gives a result of 12K.
-- 
Regards

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Lukasz Stafiniak]

For a starter, try 3.10.1 with -nopervasives:
- PR#4174 ocamlopt: fixed ocamlopt -nopervasives


On Jan 11, 2008 1:39 PM, Giles Constant <giles@spacepigs.com> wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> I'm gradually falling in love with Ocaml, but my main hobby is writing demos,
> mainly in the 64k category.  Ocaml is a great way of writing small code, alas
> it comes with a zonking great lump of baggage :-)
>
> "Hello world" written in ocaml and compiled with ocamlopt is 81K on my 32 bit
> linux box, which instantly rules it out.  (running it through upx packer, it
> comes out at 37k, which is still too high).
>
> Are there any options which can strip this down to the bare minimum?  I'm
> guessing that much of the code in there is part of the garbage collection
> code, in which case, I'll have to give up, but it would be nice to use
> ocaml :-)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Giles

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Joel Reymont]

On Jan 11, 2008, at 8:32 PM, Lukasz Stafiniak wrote:

> For a starter, try 3.10.1 with -nopervasives:
> - PR#4174 ocamlopt: fixed ocamlopt -nopervasives


Is it possible to see a small example of how this works?

This doesn't work for me:

ocamlopt -nostdlib -nopervasives -o hello pervasives.cmx hello.ml
File "hello.ml", line 1, characters 0-23:
Unbound value Pervasives.print_string

	Thanks, Joel

--
http://wagerlabs.com

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Dominique Martinet]

The -nopervasive switch simply does not load the Pervasive module
which is integrated in any executable ocaml normally produce... And
you're here using print_string which is in this module :)


Well, all the ways I know to output strings or whatever use Pervasive,
so I can't help you to replace it (I think even stdout is defined in
Pervasive~), but if you only want to get a small executable (let's say
you don't mind to return the int 42, instead of printing it), this
could help.

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Lukasz Stafiniak]

On Jan 13, 2008 10:24 AM, Dominique Martinet <asmadeus77@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well, all the ways I know to output strings or whatever use Pervasive,
> so I can't help you to replace it (I think even stdout is defined in
> Pervasive~), but if you only want to get a small executable (let's say
> you don't mind to return the int 42, instead of printing it), this
> could help.
>
You need to write your own tailored version of "Pervasives".

Re: [Caml-list] Why is ocaml so big?

[Paolo Donadeo]

> You need to write your own tailored version of "Pervasives".

A simple question: is OCaml the right tool for a 64K demo? I don't think so...


-- 
                                            Paolo


Paolo Donadeo, Senior Software Engineer
Studio Associato 4Sigma
Email: p.donadeo@4sigma.it
~
~
:wq

Re: Why is ocaml so big?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> You need to write your own tailored version of "Pervasives".
> A simple question: is OCaml the right tool for a 64K demo? I don't think so...

Depends on how you define "64KB" (especially, how do you count shared
libraries and interpreters).  Compiling with the byte-compiler should
result in reasonably compact code.


        Stefan