This repository contains Bash scripts that generate multiple "Hello, world!" executables. The goal is to compare various methods of creating small executables. Some of the executalbes are dynamically linked. Others are statically linked.
Read the comments in the scripts to see which dependencies need to be installed in order to run the scripts. Note that gcc is invoked with -m32. This will build 32-bit x86 executables. So you may need to have some special dependencies installed.
Run the scripts to attempt to build the executables. The executables will be built in the /tmp/small directory.
One interesting comparison is comparing the file sizes from a glibc system versus a musl system.
Here are the generated file sizes and filenames from a glibc-based x86_64 Ubuntu 22.04 system, and a musl-based x86 Alpine Linux 3.18 system.
glibc musl filename
-rw-r--r-- 122 122 10_hello.c
-rw-r--r-- 1280 1388 11_hello.o
-rwxr-xr-x 14944 17320 12_hello_c_dynamic
-rwxr-xr-x 13656 13556 13_hello_c_dynamic_stripped
-rw-r--r-- 200 200 20_hello.asm
-rw-r--r-- 656 656 21_hello.o
-rwxr-xr-x 8728 8728 22_hello_asm_static
-rwxr-xr-x 8460 8460 23_hello_asm_static_stripped
-rw-r--r-- 148 148 30_example_2.c
-rwxr-xr-x 13732 13648 31_example_2_dynamic
-rwxr-xr-x 13260 13196 32_example_2_dynamic_stripped
-rw-r--r-- 573 573 40_example_4.c
-rwxr-xr-x 13256 13300 41_example_4_static
-rwxr-xr-x 12820 12868 42_example_4_static_stripped
-rw-r--r-- 143 143 50_example_5.c
-rwxr-xr-x 746608 39028 51_example_5_static
-rwxr-xr-x 678036 13116 52_example_5_static_stripped
Note that:
All but the final two files are approximately the same size.
The final two files (51 and 52) are much smaller when generated on a musl-based system. These files are statically linked "Hello, world!" executables that use the write() function. For number 52, the stripped, statically-linked executables are 678,036 bytes (glibc) versus 13,116 bytes (musl). The musl-generated executable is over 50 times smaller!
At some point in the future, I may add additional methods of generating executables. I'm primarily interested in generating small, statically-linked executables, mostly using the C and C++ programming languages.