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List:       dng
Subject:    Re: [DNG] [OT] Re: Another great article about overbloatatiousness and complexification
From:       onefang <onefang_devuan () sledjhamr ! org>
Date:       2024-02-20 3:37:42
Message-ID: 20240220033742.5yvbwggjol7jd4fh () sc ! homelinuxserver ! org
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On 2024-02-19 10:54:29, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Hi Steve.
> 
> Albeit at least somewhat off-topic for the scope of the Devuan project, 
> still an interesting subject.
> 
> Steve Litt - 19.02.24, 06:18:11 CET:
> > See https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/drowning_in_code/
> 
> Indeed, indeed. I can really recommend to read through Nikolaus Wirth's 
> plea for lean software.
> 
> For a little educational fun project I tried out assembling a hello world 
> example with flat assembler in Debian package fasm. The example source is 
> also in the package. The executable is less than 300 bytes. Yes, you read 
> that right: *bytes*. Hello world unstripped with gcc compiled C source is 
> about 15,5 KiB. Even stripped it is about 14,1 KiB. So we waste about 15 
> KiB for every single executable in Debian/Devuan it seems. On my system 
> that is already more than 4000 files in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin alone. 

Have you seen the GNU hello world C source code?  It goes on for pages.

> As I worked on an Amiga related book project, a German language book about 
> AmigaOS 3.2 I worked quite a bit with AmigaOS again. Even after decades I 
> could still tell what every file is for. AmigaOS boots from hard disk 
> faster than Linux boots from SSD and that on a lot slower hardware. 
> Granted, it had no memory protection, multi user and some other features 
> that I'd consider essential these days. However… as Nikolaus Wirth 
> correctly states that still does not explain the bloat in current 
> software. Even Minix could be booted from floppy disk back in my Amiga 500 
> times. On the Amiga :).

I used to be an Amiga developer.  A friend of mine would compress
executables on his Amiga systems, one of those things where they would
uncompress themselves when you run them.  He was impressed with how
little a certain program I wrote would compress.  I wrote it in a mix of
C and assembler, for speed and small size.

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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