What are the options you compile/link with? optimised and stripped binaries are smaller than the default ones.
But whatever you try, mingw's binaries are, from my experience, always much bigger than those created with Visual C++.
The 1.9MB DLL is about the size that comes out of the MSVC compilers. I have not used mingw much, but what little experience I have reflects that of Baal's - larger end-result files (be they executables or DLL's).
on windows, msvc++ executables are smaller and faster than their GCC counterparts. luckily there are free versions of msvc++ (.net toolkit 2003 command line and c++ express 2005 ide) that are compatible with irrlicht. definitly do your final pre-release windows version compile using vc++.
No thats only for vc++ projects. But i have already found the trick in the mingw forums. Theres a command called strip.exe in mingw binaries that can be used. The dll size was reduced from 9+ MB to 1.4MB becuase i have compiled without directx drivers. That was a lot of garbage taken away.
That's no garbage, it's debug information. You can remove the -g option from the compiler and the informations will not be inclued with your binaries. But you won't get informations on the method your program crashes in.