It's not about hard drive space, it's about start up time.

The 10x LOC (despite being a huge exaggeration) is also the fixed cost, not the marginal cost. You're only forging main loop and includes, not any fundamental complexity.

This is also a funny argument coming from a Go programmer considering that Go trades off conciseness and expressivity for simplicity. Show me some of your favorite Go and I'm sure we can replace it with some concise C++.

But if everything was written in Go it might be 1 megabyte * the number of users of coreutils. Might be worth using a few more lines of code to save a little bit of space on a lot of machines.