wxWidgets sample project produces huge executable (90MB)

Question

I compiled wxWidgets 3.0.3 on Windows using MinGW64 7.2

mingw32-make -j4 -f makefile.gcc BUILD=debug SHARED=0 UNICODE=1

I then created a sample project "Hello world" with CLion 2017.3, and compiled using CMake.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.9)
project(wx_widgets_hello_world)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)

set(wxWidgets_ROOT_DIR "C:/wx_widgets_3_0_3")
set(wxWidgets_CONFIGURATION mswud)
find_package(wxWidgets COMPONENTS adv core base REQUIRED)
include(${wxWidgets_USE_FILE})

add_executable(wx_widgets_hello_world main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(wx_widgets_hello_world ${wxWidgets_LIBRARIES})

Included headers are

#include <wx/wx.h>
#include <wx/grid.h>

adv is there because I'm experimenting the wxGrid class. I check the produced .exe and it is 90MB. Sure I'm doing something wrong. Any thought?

I'm not an expert with CMake (never used before), but maybe its because I'm linking all the libraries (adv base core) with

target_link_libraries(wx_widgets_hello_world ${wxWidgets_LIBRARIES})

Answer 1

Firstly, Debug builds are always way larger than Release ones, since they contain a lot of information used for debugging. So, checking a Release build size would give you much more useful information.

Secondly, I assume that SHARED=0 means that wxWidgets is build as a static library, and is linked statically. What it means is that the whole library is merged into your executable. It is generally better to actually use shared versions of libraries, for a variety of reasons. In particular, this will dramatically reduce the executable size. Note that the user will need the wxWidgets shared library anyway to run your executable, but it may be already installed on his system.

Finally, have a look at object stripping. It is a process that removes unused symbols (functions, global variables, etc) from your executable. I don't know whether CMake does this by default. The GCC compiler option "-Os" (optimize for size) is also a nice thing to do for release builds.