huge object files. Expectable?

[Andrew F. Nelson]

Hi all,

Hopefully, I'm asking my questions in the right place. Looks like mostly
developer traffic here rather than user traffic, of which this message
is the latter. Please redirect as necessary.

Recently, I downloaded the gfortran binary that can be found on your
website for intel macs. For reference, it calls itself:

Target: i386-apple-darwin8.10.1
Configured with: /tmp/gfortran-20090604/ibin/../gcc/configure --prefix=/usr/local/gfortran --enable-languages=c,fortran --with-gmp=/tmp/gfortran-20090604/gfortran_libs --enable-bootstrap
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.5.0 20090604 (experimental) [trunk revision 148180] (GCC) 


After getting it going and trying to compile a few things, I notice that
occasionally I will get an extremely large object file: hundreds of MB in size.
The specific files that seem to create these large .o files declare a number 
of arrays to rather large sizes and have no other functionality (i.e. no
procedures). Based on that fact, it may be understandable that it makes
a large .o file, but since I have never really observed this with other 
compilers over the years, I'm wondering:

1) is this something that is expectable with gfortran? (why? and why not with others?)
2) is it some sort of pathological case that you haven't hit and therefore
might be called 'regression' or some such?

I can provide an example file that triggers this, if anyone wants to look
at it.

On a separate note: I sort of wondered about the version string above...gcc 4.5
isn't released yet, afaik, but above it claims to be a gfortran 4.5 version.
How seriously should I take the 'experimental' flag? I'd guess that the date
is actually not too far off of the gcc 4.4 release. Is it a reasonably close
approximation of 4.4?

Thanks,

Andy Nelson