jerhinesmith on "Hello, world" in Assembly.

Can someone give some insight on the last line?

That's it. Simple. Now you can launch the hello program by entering ./hello. Look at the binary size -- surprised?

Without being able to compile the executable myself, is the binary surprisingly large or small? A few months ago, someone posted this article:

http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/03/libc-free-world/

Which leads me to believe that the executable is surprisingly large given the content. Am I understanding that correctly?

billforsternz 16y

I am only guessing but I suspect the binary will be tiny. The earlier article you mentioned described how hello world is surprisingly large with libc overheads. It then sets out to eliminate those overheads and concentrates on the problems involved in doing that. But it doesn't mention how small the binary gets once those overheads are successfully eliminated, My expectation would be just a handful of bytes.

Garra 16y

In my case the binary turned out to be much larger than I would have expected. I was expecting a couple hundred bytes tops, but 8k?

  osx-box:dev esa$ nasm -f macho hello.asm && ld -e _start -o hello hello.o

  osx-box:dev esa$ ls -lh hello*
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 esa  staff   8.1K Sep  5 22:43 hello
  -rw-r--r--  1 esa  staff   721B Sep  5 22:39 hello.asm
  -rw-r--r--  1 esa  staff   389B Sep  5 22:43 hello.o

Comments