Go Systems Programming

Checking the size of the executable file

So, after successfully compiling hw.go, you might want to check the size of the generated executable file:

$ ls -l hw
-rwxr-xr-x  1 mtsouk  staff  1628192 Feb  9 22:29 hw
$ file hw
hw: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64  

Compiling the same Go program on a Linux machine will create the following file:

$ go versiongo 
go version go1.3.3 linux/amd64
$ go build hw.go
$ ls -l hw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mtsouk mtsouk 1823712 Feb 18 17:35 hw
$ file hw
hw: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
  

To get a better sense of how big the Go executable is, consider that the executable for the same program written in C is about 8432 bytes!

So, you might ask why such a huge executable file ...