As the analysis of code segment size shows, compiling with -O tremendously increases the size used by the ctors. This happens because I inlined most ctors, did it? Should check by compiling with -DOUTLINE -O and see if code sizes reduces. The problem here is that code sizes of a simple HL7 application can reach near overkill size when compiled with -O. So this is a rather urgent task (right before testing the code with memory leak detectors and profiler).