Why is compiled Linux executable so large?

Today I encountered another issue when compiling my Qt application http://www.orm-designer.com/ under Linux. The size of final executable was about 400MB.
The first thought was that there is some static libraries compiled to application. But the problem was elsewhere.

Unlike to Windows compilation where linker creates .exe and .pdb file, linux linker creates only one final file. So this file includes also lot of additional symbols useful for debugging and post-mortem bugs finding. But it is not so usefull for distribution your application. To strip all these symbols, use following command

strip --strip-unneeded /path/to/application

Strip command have a lot of switches, but after a short testing it seems that the results are the same. Maybe I’m doing something wrong or simply my executable doesn’t contain any additional infos for stripping.

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