profiler - Are there any tools for tracking down bloat in C++?

Question

A carelessly written template here, some excessive inlining there - it's all too easy to write bloated code in C++. In principle, refactoring to reduce that bloat isn't too hard. The problem is tracing the worst offending templates and inlines - tracing those items that are causing real bloat in real programs.

With that in mind, and because I'm certain that my libraries are a bit more bloat-prone than they should be, I was wondering if there's any tools that can track down those worst offenders automatically - i.e. identify those items that contribute most (including all their repeated instantiations and calls) to the size of a particular target.

I'm not much interested in performance at this point - it's all about the executable file size.

Are there any tools for this job, usable on Windows, and fitting with either MinGW GCC or Visual Studio?

EDIT - some context

I have a set of multiway-tree templates that act as replacements for the red-black tree standard containers. They are written as wrappers around non-typesafe non-template code, but they were also written a long time ago and as an "will better cache friendliness boost real performance" experiment. The point being, they weren't really written for long-term use.

Because they support some handy tricks, though (search based on custom comparisons/partial keys, efficient subscripted access, search for smallest unused key) they ended up being in use just about everywhere in my code. These days, I hardly ever use std::map.

Layered on top of those, I have some more complex containers, such as two-way maps. On top of those, I have tree and digraph classes. On top of those...

Using map files, I could track down whether non-inline template methods are causing bloat. That's just a matter of finding all the instantiations of a particular method and adding the sizes. But what about unwisely inlined methods? The templates were, after all, meant to be thin wrappers around non-template code, but historically my ability to judge whether something should be inlined or not hasn't been very reliable. The bloat impact of those template inlines isn't so easy to measure.

I have some idea which methods are heavily used, but that's the well-known opimization-without-profiling mistake.

Answer 1

Check out Symbol Sort. I used it a while back to figure out why our installer had grown by a factor of 4 in six months (it turns out the answer was static linking of the C runtime and libxml2).