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Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

reminds me of a really old article (before the term 'blog' even existed) about a person exploring why the heck a 'hello world' Linux ELF binary was so darn big. i think it's an interesting exercise to figure out why 'hello world' in your favorite language/runtime environment is the size that it is (e.g., what initialization code is being called, are any VMs or intepreters being setup, etc.)

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That was my first thought as well. That article is found at http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm... (if that's the one you were thinking of)

yup exactly! HN makes for a great crowdsourced expert search engine ;)

I'm not surprised you thought of that; Jessica McKellar's article almost sounds as if it was modeled after mine in places. I'm wondering now if that's due to actual imitation, or a subconscious influence, or if it's just a natural approach for someone to take to the subject. Which naturally leads to the question: was I unconsciously imitating someone else when I wrote my article?

(Come to think of it, I vaguely remember having in mind some of Isaac Asmiov's science essays when I wrote that -- one of the type in which he would trace the discovery of some principle through several refinements over the centuries. Those essays gave me an appreciation for the value of studying science in its historical context. But that's a much more general influence than what I'm referring to.)

The same project with Win32 PEs: http://www.phreedom.org/solar/code/tinype/

I've used that page as a reference several times over the years.

Yup, it was the same article that I was thinking about. Although architecture has changed from x86 to amd64.

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