the smallest fpc program

[JSoftware]

does FPC not remove unused code, variable and consts?

in my assembler/compiler, i have include 10,000 lines of code, and if my main file does nothing it will be the minimum exe size, why does FPC use 30kb that is ridiculous....

You forget that FPC has a lot of internals that needs initialization in a stock RTL. Multithreaded heap management, code page conversion tables for strings, wide string managers, thread managers, stack checking, command line parsing, virtual methods for TObject, etc

[AirPas]

thanks for your help ,looks interesting now , MessageBox becomes 542b !! after compressing with upx and com

[code_glitch]

Aside from a 30kb executeable being limited in functionality - UPX is a very good bet IMO. Although I admit I find 700kb ok and 70kb to be very small for me. You could always do some ASM8086 on linux - virtually no size at all.

[marcov]

Also read the FPC wiki page about EXE sizes: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Size_Matters

Most importantly the "why bother?" bit.