>Ariya and I have had a discussion on whether SpeedCrunch can be built as a statically linked executable on Windows, and if that is a useful thing to have. Ariya has also wanted to try using the UPX binary compression tool on SpeedCrunch. Tonight I sat down and played around with this and these are my findings:
#1 On Windows, we will always require an installer for some users. That is because we need to create start menu entries and such. Perhaps a platform specific part of SpeedCrunch could do this when executed the first time – but an Installer is still nice to have (it also brings and uninstaller which has proven very nice on Windows).
#2 A statically executable for Windows is also nice. Portable applications are gaining popularity and some users are satisfied with a single exe file instead of installing something.
#3 I have not succeded (yet) when it comes to building a Qt environment for Windows that yeilds executables not depending on mingwm10.dll. This has to be solved before the executable can be distributed all alone.
#4 Using UPX on the statically compiled executable brings it from 9 613 312 bytes to 3 182 592 bytes. I bet that I can save even more space by having a think when I configure Qt. (The installer for the dynamically linked version is 4 546 560 bytes).