[ploxiln]

Yeah - so your stripped and dynamically linked executable is just about as large as a statically built one... and yours still has to link glibc.

I can build busybox (a multi-call all-in-one executable, use symlinks to refer to the binary with the name of a tool and it acts like that tool), with init and bourne shell and the minimal set of command-line tools (coreutils remakes and util-linux remakes) into a 600KiB executable statically linked with uclibc. Combined with a linux kernel, I can boot with it. Meanwhile, my glibc is 2MiB.

Modern computers are really amazing. And it's also amazing that the understandable trend of letting software get bigger and slower as long as it doesn't really cause problems on current hardware has resulted in such astounding (though mostly harmless) waste.

All that said, these stali project pages have existed for years, and there's nothing interesting to show for it. Not that many people really buy into this thing (including me).

[vinkelhake]

Busybox is great and it's specifically built to be tiny. I don't really know what the stali guys are going for. Are they building something to compete with busybox or something more general? If it's the latter then a user will probably have a lot of programs that use way more of the standard library than "hello world" does.

As it stands, the FAQ entry is comparing apples and oranges. Comparing full-featured and dynamically linked programs to statically linked, but feature-limited ones is only interesting if you can get by with the feature-limited version. I suspect we're in agreement.