Hi Alison,
This issue is not specific to Fortran, but it's specific to Darwin
(you say that "the large object files have been observed on many other
platforms", but could you give a list of such platforms?):
$ cat a.c
int x[9999999] = { 0 };
$ gcc -c a.c && ls -lh a.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 fx wheel 38M May 12 13:43 a.o
$ size a.o
__TEXT __DATA __OBJC others dec hex
0 39999996 0 0 39999996 26259fc
while on x86_64-linux, I get:
$ cat a.c
int x[9999999] = { 0 };
$ gcc -c a.c && ls -lh a.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 fx fx 959 May 12 13:44 a.o
$ size a.o
text data bss dec hex filename
0 0 39999996 39999996 26259fc a.o
The different between the two is between .bss (x86_64-linux) and .data
(darwin). I don't know enough about Mach-O to tell if it's a bug or a
feature :)
FX
