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Comment by jk4930 | Hacker News Reader

My first Hello World in Ada was 2.3 MB, but I'm sure it was the most safe and reliable Hello World in existence.

I have no idea what you did, but I find that hard to believe, and this is with GNAT.

I have a hello.adb program, 99bytes, compiled 25k

  -rwxrwxr-x 1 seg seg 25352 Nov  2 01:26 hello  
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg    99 Nov  2 01:23 hello.adb  
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg  1409 Nov  2 01:26 hello.ali  
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg  1576 Nov  2 01:26 hello.o

End of the 1990s with GNAT 3.1xx on Windows. IIRC there were several libraries and runtime elements included "just in case" and I didn't know that I had to deselect them. Perhaps it was the default setting in the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) that I used at this time. Didn't experience that with later GNATs (without GPS) on Linux.

I still laugh about my first Hello World. My friends mocked me for my megabyte-sized beginner programs. It totally was in line with the image of Ada being a bloated, bureaucratic DoD monster. GPS made things feel extra complicated and ugly.

That said, I'm considering to use Ada 2012 for several of my upcoming works.

Older versions of GNAT used to statically link by default IIRC.

So you'd inevitably get some clueless complaints that Ada was so much bloat compared to C, based on comparing the size of a statically linked executable to a dynamically linked executable.

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