I am following the series, and out of curiosity I went into VS2015, created a new project, loaded up my HH code so far, and did a 'release' build of it.
The .exe that I am creating with the 'build.bat' idea that was shown in the videos (Basically "cl main.cpp" ) with libraries on the end, is almost SEVEN times the file size as the .exe that VS2015 spit out.
Are there just compiler flags I am missing? I feel like the size difference is just enormous and I am missing something.
(I have not watched the entire series so if this is something he covered, then oops)
You probably did not change C/C++ runtime for VS2015 project to use statically linked C/C++ runtime. By default VS uses dynamically linked C/C++ runtime (from DLL file) - thus reducing exe file size.
You can change it in Project Properties -> C/C++ -> Code Generation -> Runtime Library. Set it to "Multi-threaded" or "Multi-threaded Debug". Without DLL.