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That's probably because you wrote C++ and are usimg C++ streams. Try just using printf. The binary, after stripping, will be much smaller (I think less than 20k). You can use DependencyWalker to check what DLLs you are linking to.

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Ah, I was using C but I didn't realized needed to strip the binary, after doing that it comes down to 39k which is smaller than the Microsoft equivalent so you're right, it does seem to be using dynamic linking :(

For comparison, VC6 defaults give 40K (statically linked), switching to dynlink shrinks it to 16K, add a few more switches and it drops to 1.5K.

Is it possible to do that with the latest versions (i.e. linking to their CRT instead of MSVCRT.DLL), or are they incapable of doing it for some odd reason? These are the options I used:

/MD /O1 /Os /link /align:4096 /filealign:512 /merge:.rdata=.text /merge:.data=.text /section:.text,EWR

Well, yes and no. Yes it does link to msvcrt.dll but it also brings in its own runtime too statically (mingwrt). Standard mingw links libgcc dynamically but you can use TDM gcc if you want to link it statically. I can't think of a bad reason not to use TDM gcc.

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