Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C

An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Comments

Old news is VERY OLD

[deblau]

http://web.archive.org/web/19991128041233/http://muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

November 1999. Slow news day much?

Re:Old news is VERY OLD

[shird]

Indeed, this is very old news, it's been done many times before. I recall reading and applying this article for Windows many years ago:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301696.aspx

there's also: http://www.ntcore.com/files/SmallAppWiz.htm and http://www.phreedom.org/solar/code/tinype/ (again for windows) and many more.

Re:C++ is worse

[macshit]

Shouldn't the linker remove unreferenced functions?

I've had this problem with gcc for a while, with C++ code. I was writing some embedded code, and I wanted to use some simple C++. Just by adding a #include of one of the stream libraries. the executable grew by 200k, even though none of it was referenced. The C++ code in iostream is template-generated anyway, so even if the compiler wanted to include the code, it can't until I instantiate it.

<iostream> includes references to global stream objects like std::cout, not just interface definitions, so including it's going to have larger ramifications that something like <fstream>, which just defines interfaces (and indeed, for me, including <fstream> seems to have no effect on program size, whereas including <iostream> adds about 300 bytes to a simple executable).