Eliminating static binaries (Was: Unwanted RPM dependencies)

[Bill Nottingham]

Bernardo Innocenti (bernie at codewiz.org) said: 
> >I don't forsee a static executable being smaller than a dynamic
> >executable in the real world.  It is possible that somebody could
> >hand-build (e.g. no gcc, ld, etc.) such an executable, but that doesn't
> >really count (since that isn't done in the real world).
> 
> Somebody actually *could* make small static binaries:
> 
>  http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
> 
> (for the lazy, the binary is just 45 bytes and even *does*
> something useful ;-)

Yes, and violates the ELF standard, and is in hand-written assembly,
and occupies the exact same amount of disk space and memory to load
as the dynamic version that he started out with. (Seriously, if your
code is already under a page size, what's the point?)

Bill