[Two9A]

These kinds of articles are always fun: essentially playing golf with the size of an executable or some other file format.

To plug my own entry in the genre, back in 2006 a few members of the Nintendo DS emulation scene tried to put together the smallest DS ROM that would still do something visible on the system: https://imrannazar.com/hacks/the-smallest-nds-rom

We ended up with a 352-byte file with two minimal executables, for the ARM7 and ARM9 cores. I've yet to see a .nds file smaller than that.

[tetris11]

Check out the 357-byte x86_64 ELF file to bootstrap the entire Guix software stack (albeit with a guile helper library)

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

The annotated ELF file contains two types of comment annotations corresponding to the different software that parses it.

https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX...