20 Oct
2017
20 Oct
'17
3:31 a.m.
On Oct 19, 2017, at 6:27 PM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you
don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly
zeros.
There are parlor tricks people play to get binary sizes down to
incredibly small values, but I found the results interesting. Building
the obvious C program on a PDP-11 running 7th Edition yields a 136
byte executable, stripped. Still infinitely greater than /bin/true in
the limit, but still svelte by modern standards.
No matter how tiny you can make the a.out, the kernel's still going to have to map in
at least one page to hold it, so you're eating a minimum of 4K on any modern machine,
regardless.