Is OS Wasting Memory? Quick Experiment Results

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A user conducted an experiment compiling a simple "Hello World" program in C++ with the gcc compiler, noting that the source code is only 100 bytes while the resulting executable is 9.6 KB. Upon examining the executable in hex format, a significant portion—almost a kilobyte—consists of zeros. The user speculates that this may indicate a delay or unused bits, suggesting that the zero-filled section could represent the data segment of the program, which typically allocates a 1K block by default. They express uncertainty about whether gcc can be configured to reduce memory usage and recommend checking the gcc documentation for potential options.
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I did a quick experiment. First I compiled a simple hello world program in C++ , using a gcc compiler. The source code is 100 bytes, but the executable file it 9.6 kb.

Then I dumbed the executable into hex using xxd, to check up on the 0s and 1s. It turns out there is a huge gap, almost a kilobyte long of zeros.

I'm wondering if this is some sort of delay, or just unused bits?
 
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I'm guessing that the section with 0s is the data segment of your program, and that unless you specify otherwise, it will allocate a 1K block for it. I don't have any experience with gcc, so don't know if you can configure it to use less memory. Check the docs for gcc.
 

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