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PPK debuts the tiny programming challenge

Posted by Hemos on from the very-very-small dept.

kernelistic writes "Looks like the great folks at properkernel.com are running a developer challenge. They're looking for smallest executables that match the posted criteria. The rules look fairly straightforward. Anyone up for some fun?"

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting challenge. by AJWM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just for comparison's sake, the quick'n'dirty approach:

    main()
    {
    char *msg = "The deep gray mouse runs after the holy yellow cheese.\n";
    write(1, msg, 56);
    }

    produces, stripped, a 3200 byte binary -- too big to qualify by 700 bytes.

    --
    -- Alastair
  2. Beat this... by andfarm · · Score: 3, Interesting
    At one point I wrote a Mac OS (Classic) program that displayed the phase of the moon (as text AND a graphic) in a dialog box.

    The catch? I did it in 5,038 bytes, including a nifty color icon.

    Beat that.

    --

    TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.

    1. Re:Beat this... by photon317 · · Score: 3, Interesting


      Heh, a freind of mine and I, about 8 years ago we had an x86 assembler programming contest between us. This contest was to reproduce a pager program under DOS (like the "more" command) that would take a filename argument and page it to the screen, one page per keystroke. He beat me just barely, the final numbers of bytes were like 97 and 102.

      --
      11*43+456^2
  3. Re:howto of sorts... by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    His solution was 45 bytes. I think the 2500 byte limit in the rules is going to encourage some solutions whose writers will be crushed by the winner.

    It's a nice challenge, but I think they should have been a bit more specific in the rules ('Preferably no fastcall binaries') and stated a more challenging task than putting out a string.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  4. super easy to beat the limit... by Just6979 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    justin@joker:~/tmp[1]$ cat small.s
    ; Justin White
    ; http://properkernel.com/tiny/ entry

    %define STDOUT 0
    %define SYS_exit 1
    %define SYS_write 4

    section data
    msg db "The deep gray mouse runs after the holy yellow cheese.", 0x0A
    msg_size equ $-msg

    section text
    global _start
    _start:
    ; write
    push dword msg_size
    push dword msg
    push dword STDOUT
    mov eax, SYS_write
    push eax
    int 0x80
    ; exit
    push dword 0
    mov eax, SYS_exit
    push eax
    int 0x80
    ; end _start

    ;EOF
    justin@joker:~/tmp[0]$ nasm -f elf small.s
    justin@joker:~/tmp[0]$ ld -x -s -o small -nostdlib --stats small.o
    /usr/libexec/elf/ld: total time in link: 0.006606
    /usr/libexec/elf/ld: data size 184328
    justin@joker:~/tmp[0]$ ll small
    -rwxrwxr-x 1 justin justin 516 Nov 25 03:22 small*
    justin@joker:~/tmp[0]$ ./small
    The deep gray mouse runs after the holy yellow cheese.
    justin@joker:~/tmp[0]$

    that's using FreeBSD kernel calls.

    that's the smallest it'll be without doing ELF header tweaking like in that tiny binary tutorial.

    actually, can save like 8 bytes by using just AL and not all of EAX to hold the syscall numbers.

    now, if they said, do it without using the kernel, that would have been a challenge :P

    --
    --Justin