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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

1.0MB is quite large compared to 6.34kB :)

It definitely is, although a cool thing about busybox is that you can rebuild it with any applets disabled. I'm not sure just how small it can get though.

But yeah, the tradeoff of that 1MB is that you get a very functional shell environment vs just an http server. It's impressive just how small ut is, given everything that it is capable of

> It definitely is, although a cool thing about busybox is that you can rebuild it with any applets disabled. I'm not sure just how small it can get though.

They do distribute statically linked individual binaries [0]. For just HTTPD and nothing else is about 85kb. But it is a lot more than just a static file server - it comes with CGI support.

[0] https://www.busybox.net/downloads/binaries/1.30.0-i686/

> But yeah, the tradeoff of that 1MB is that you get a very functional shell environment vs just an http server. It's impressive just how small ut is, given everything that it is capable of

Maybe.. I suspect a well-designed Forth image could pack similar capability in less than 100kB. So it might seem low, but not a miracle.

Certainly, I think this is more about getting over the developer pain threshold. In terms of computer speed vs human perception I don't see either one mattering too much (compared to a 900meg base for node-debian on Docker, although I guess there is some incremental stuff for that?).

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