Comment by Aurornis

> My point was that many programmers have no conception of much functionality you can fit in a program of a few megabytes.

Many of my real-world Rust backend services are in the 1-2MB range.

> Here is a pastebin[1] of a Python program that creates a "Hello world" x64 elf binary.

> How large do you think the ELF binary is? Not 1kb. Not 10kb. Not 100kb. Not 263kb.

> The executable is 175 bytes.

You can also disable the standard library and a lot of Rust features and manually write the syscall assembly into a Rust program. With enough tweaking of compiler arguments you'd probably get it to be a very small binary too.

But who cares? I can transfer a 10MB file in a trivial amount of time. Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. Playing code golf for programs that don't do anything is fun as a hobby, but using it as a debate about modern software engineering is nonsensical.