How to reduce the size of executable produced by MinGW g++ compiler?

Question

I have a trivial "Hello world" C++ program that is compiled to 500kB executable by MinGW g++ compiler under Win XP. Some say that is caused by iostream library and static link of libstdc++.dll.

Using -s linker option helped a bit (reducing 50% size), but I would by satisfied only by <10kB executable. Is there any way how to achieve this using MinGW compiler? Portability is not a big concern for me.

Is it possible to copy libstdc++.dll with the executable using dynamic linking? If so, how to achieve this?

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Solved: I was using MinGW 3.4. Now I updated to latest MinGW 4.6 and the size was decreased by 90% to 50kB, with -s option even to 9kB, which is fully sufficient. Anyway - thanks everyone for help. Here you go my results

C++ Hello World program using iostream

MinGW | no options | -s option
------------------------------
3.4   | 500kB      | 286 kB
4.6   | 50kB       |   9 kB

Answer 1

Flags to use:

• -s like you've been doing to strip symbols
• -lstdc++_s to specify dynamically linking against the libstdc++.dll
• -Os to optimize the binary for size.

By default mingw static links to libstdc++.a on Windows.

Note that the lstdc++_s flag is only in MinGW with GCC > 4.4, I believe.