SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated: It depends on how well you know the compiler. On my system here (Linux 2.0 with GCC 2.7.2.3: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello world\n"); return(EXIT_SUCCESS); } I compiled using ``gcc -O4 -fomit-frame-pointer -o hello hello.c ; strip hello'' and I got an executable of 2,684 bytes in size. Not content with that, I then wrote: #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(void) { write(STDOUT_FILENO,"Hello world\n",12); _exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } Which avoids the Standard C Library and calls the Unix kernel directly. I then did: gcc -O4 -fomit-frame-pointer -c -o h2.o h2.c ld -o h2 -Bstatic -e main h2.o /usr/lib/libc.a strip h2 Which got me an executable of 768 bytes. Many years ago I hand crafted a 168 byte ``Hello World'' program on the SGI. And by hand crafted, that means I built the executable (including headers) byte by byte. That was (and perhaps still is) the smallest binary you could have had on an SGI. It was several years later when I came across an incantation that would turn the C version (the second one above) into a ~350 byte executable. I don't recall the incantation but it was impressive. -spc (The smallest I've been able to get is 372, and that's by writing directly in assembler and discarding unused segments ... )