Cheat Engine

[hcavolsdsadgadsg]

I've seen examples of stupidly small C++ programs, that seemingly abuse the linker settings.

Curious I look and find something boasting a mere 1kb size. All it is, is a simple messagebox and it the linker gets this.

/FILEALIGN:512 /MERGE:.data=.text /MERGE:.rdata=.text /SECTION:.text,EWR /IGNORE:4078

I get what it does, but... what's the catch? What bad can come from fucking with this shit?

edit: woop

did my research and it seems that the program incorporates necessary parts of the c runtime library into the .exe, aka static linking. We can use our own function however to bypass this, but doing so we miss out on some things like fopen and you have to use the Win32 api to get around it. All in all, my exe size went from 48, to 3 and rars to a mere 768 bytes. So while dicking with the linker settings can shave off a few KB's, a good bit of bloat comes from this.

It's easy to do too.

[appalsap]

well without the RT it's just like writing an assembly program. you can even get to 1.0 kb (minimum PE size) with /O1 if you really care.

I don't use any of those settings, you don't need a static C runtime either, just link to the msvcrt.lib that comes with MASM and whenever you call a C runtime function it imports it from msvcrt.dll, there goes all of the bloat!

oh and you have to write your own main, but that's real easy.

merging sections is bad, they're seperate for a reason (different permissions, ex: data can be read/written but not executed, code can be executed but not read/written...)

[hcavolsdsadgadsg]