On Bjarne Stroustrup's site, it's says in the FAQs: ________________________________ Why is the code generated for the "Hello world" program ten times larger for C++ than for C? It isn't on my machine, and it shouldn't be on yours. I have even seen the C++ version of the "hello world" program smaller than the C version. When I recently (2004) tested using gcc -o2 on a Unix, the two versions (iostreams and stdio) yielded identical sizes. There is no language reason why the one version should be larger than the other. It is all an issue on how the implementor organized the libraries. If one version is significantly larger than the other, report the problem to the implementor of the larger. __________________________________ Perhaps unnecessary files are being included in <iostream>. These files should NOT be over 400 KB. In fact, a standard Win32 header compiles to a smaller file.
Really this is nothing to do with header files really. I think the FAQ is wrong with respect to the C++98 standard as he forgets there are locale supported added which brings in a lot. Also including iostream, forces the initialization of the C++ standard streams.
Let's consider this simply a duplicate of 28080. I'm improving the situation a bit, but don't expect miracles ;) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28080 ***