[zokier]

Isn't the reason for busybox multi-call binary mostly just ELF being bloated? So the answer for resource constrained systems would be to have more efficient executable format. I don't see why multi-call binary + bunch of symlinks would be intrisically much more size-efficient than something purpose-built.

[yuliyp]

a lot of code is shared between different tools. Busybox has one copy of those. Before you mention shared libraries. There is still overhead, as well as complicating the usage (it needs to find a shared lib when starting instead of just having all it needs in the binary). This isn't really a property of the executable format. Any format would have the same problem.