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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I think instead of line count, either final binary size or source code size in bytes should be more common in claims of minimalism; the demoscene, for example, always uses binary size.

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I got kinda dragged about this on reddit/twitter. Afterwards I posted on r/tinycode with the size in bytes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tinycode/comments/nn5djb/pokegb_a_g...

Don’t let any of these comments take away from how great this is, _especially_ with the in-depth blog post.

would it be possible to push it down to IOCCC size? Would be fun to see it there, of course.

I think so, when I was doing the write-up I noticed a few things I could have improved (and a few bugs!)

Number of nodes in the AST or number of machine instructions might be more meaningful.

That metric is game-able, too: you just implement a VM, and only count the instructions to to VM. The rest is one big binary blob of "data", occupying a single node in the AST of the host language.

Now, of course, that's basically cooking the books, but there's a wide gulf between a full VM & smaller, domain specific ones that might not look like VMs. (All or most of data-driven programming, really.)

Final binary size including all external dependencies is probably fairest metric. With heavy use of libraries things get messy.

> including all external dependencies

The OS too?

source code size can still be manipulated by using very small identifiers or reusing them.

There should rather be a normalization metric where all identifiers are treated as eight characters long

Resulting binary will be different depending on the compiler and type of optimization and would simply be manipulated by optimizing heavily for size.

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