Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)
Turbo Pascal 3.02, a compact Pascal compiler and integrated development environment for MS-DOS, released in September 1986, boasted an impressive 39,731 byte executable, outperforming Microsoft's compilers in terms of speed. To put this into perspective for the year 2011, it has been compared with various modern software components and files.
These include the minified version of jQuery 1.6 (90,518 bytes), a white iPhone 4S image on apple.com (190,157 bytes), the zlib.h header file from the Mac OS X Lion SDK (80,504 bytes), the touch command in OS X Lion (44,016 bytes), and various vim quick reference cards in PDF format (47,508 bytes). Even a compiled Erlang R14B02 parser (erl_parse.beam, 286,324 bytes) is larger than Turbo Pascal's executable.
The author, James Hague, a veteran programmer, reflects on this in his piece "Programming Without Being Obsessed With Programming and Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry."
Written by urgent.news from Hacker News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
