[tptacek]

You are off by two orders of magnitude in the C case, at least with my trivial test case of writing hello world, and then a runner program that forks/execs/waitpids 10,000 times.

If you know what crt0.c does, you can see C is also pretty much the asymptote of what you're going to get from program startup, so it's a little silly to make the comparison.