Reducing your executable size

Some people complain that Allegro produces very large executables. This is certainly true: with the DJGPP version, a simple "hello world" program will be about 200k, although the per-executable overhead is much less for platforms that support dynamic linking. But don't worry, Allegro takes up a relatively fixed amount of space, and won't increase as your program gets larger. As George Foot so succinctly put it, anyone who is concerned about the ratio between library and program code should just get to work and write more program code to catch up :-)

Having said that, there are several things you can do to make your programs smaller:

Note: the aforementioned methods for removing unused hardware drivers only apply to statically linked versions of the library, eg. DOS. On Windows and Unix platforms, you can build Allegro as a DLL or shared library, which prevents these methods from working, but saves so much space that you probably won't care about that. Removing unused color depths from alconfig.h will work on any platform, though.

If you are distributing a copy of the setup program along with your game, you may be able to get a dramatic size reduction by merging the setup code into your main program, so that only one copy of the Allegro routines will need to be linked. See setup.txt for details. In the DJGPP version, after compressing the executable, this will probably save you about 200k compared to having two separate programs for the setup and the game itself.



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