> however compiling a small program turned into a huge file.
---
> Anyhow, that 2M is almost all infrastructure.  It contains a lot of
> management and exception-handling framework, the entire component
> libraray, etc.  For a small program, I agree that it makes for an
> insane amount of overhead.
> 
> However, as you add to the program, it will grow very, very slowly.

Yep, your tiny program is larger than expected because of what got sucked in
from CLX. I haven't looked to see whether the feature was carried over from
Delphi, but if you can build your project with packages, the resulting file
will be much smaller.... 20-30Kb? Of course, you'll have to distribute
packages files along with your app, so you're back up to 400+Kb, not
counting the .so file.

If I remember right, the .so file is a custom copy of QT. Borland purposely
chose this route because they didn't want apps breaking all over the place
just because someone installed an incompatible version of QT on their
system.

For comparison, the same app would be about 250Kb if it used the
Windows-only VCL without packages, and without the need to distribute any
extra files. The extra code and distributables when building with CLX is
from all the shoe-horning required to make things work the same on both
platforms. 

Lee Behrens