My problem with the article is that it's not really theoretically useful, it's just a case for one particular program. Writing large programs in C, I rarely see the need to optimise program size - I'm more interested in execution time. Even so, with thousands of lines of code, the executable is typically I think this article is slightly outdated as we don't run 64kb 8-bit machines anymore. My last comment is that you…
The end result is not useful, but I learned a lot of new things about C and processes along the way.
And I thought it was an inspiring exercise to go as far down to the metal as possible.
It does make me feel guilty when programming Ruby that I sometimes create an entire array object to compare two integers because it looks prettier, without any regard for performance. It feels so wasteful.