[lukego]

The rule is not meant to be universal, and I don't say other people should adopt it, but I think it's suitable for the work that I am doing right now.

Constraints like this can really shape a piece of software, for better or for worse. My inspiration is having work with a really powerful firmware system that had a hardware constraint to fit on a 1MB flash chip, everything included, and was done so well that it looked easy. Give yourself unlimited space and it's much easier to end up with UEFI...

I suspect quite a few programs out there would have turned out better if their authors had picked a semi-arbitrary maximum value for lines of code / bytes of RAM / bytes of disk / etc.

The actual rule I'm using for now is: - 1 second compile excluding dependencies. - 1 minute compile including dependencies (excl C compiler). - 1 MB executable including everything except libc and base OS.