Comparison of core sizes

Compiling the modified Tcl core for a number of different flags combinations yielded Table 2. It shows us how much of the object code in a static interpreter is used by the various features.

**Table 2:** Size of `libtcl.a`for selected variants
Flags	lib/libtcl8.3.a
	Size, absolute	Size, relative	Shrinkage, relative
	490124	100.00	0.00
TCL_NO_CHANNEL_EOF	489964	99.97	0.03
TCL_NO_CHANNEL_BLOCKED	489940	99.96	0.04
TCL_NO_PIDCMD	489824	99.94	0.06
TCL_NO_CHANNEL_READ	489420	99.86	0.14
TCL_NO_TTY	488268	99.62	0.38
TCL_NO_CHANNELCOPY	488032	99.57	0.43
TCL_NO_LOADCMD	487264	99.42	0.58
TCL_NO_CMDALIASES	486576	99.28	0.72
TCL_NO_SLAVEINTERP	485080	98.97	1.03
TCL_NO_CHANNEL_CONFIG	484932	98.94	1.06
TCL_NO_SOCKETS	484428	98.84	1.16
TCL_NO_FILEEVENTS	484376	98.83	1.17
TCL_NO_SLAVEINTERP	480624	98.06	1.94
TCL_NO_CMDALIASES
TCL_NO_PIPES	480136	97.96	2.04
TCL_NO_NONSTDCHAN	463544	94.58	5.42
TCL_NO_FILESYSTEM	440940	89.96	10.04
MODULAR_TCL	403228	82.27	17.73

It is obvious from looking at this table that most of the chosen features reduce the overall size of the static interpreter by only very small amounts of space. Only the file system code and the code dealing with the management of channels beyond the standard channels reduce the size by moderately significant amounts of space.

There is obviously room for improvement here. The question is, where are the features whose removal will reduce the library by significant amounts of space ? Our best answer so far is Table 7. This table lists the 36 largest object files and thus points us to the main areas we should look into.

Based on that data several possibilities for additional features to be removed are discussed in more detail later, in chapter 7, about our future work.