(Note: The size in the article is 21.7 MB, and not 2.17 MB!) I just tried building a statically linked 'hello world' c++ program, and co-incidentally, the bina

(Note: The size in the article is 21.7 MB, and not 2.17 MB!) I just tried building a statically linked 'hello world' c++ program, and co-incidentally, the binary also happened to be 2.1 MB! #include <iostream> int main( int, const char *[] ) { std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl; return 0; } 'g++ -static -o hello hello.cpp' produces a binary of 2191112 bytes (Linux x64). Stripping it of debug symbols leaves a 1.7 MB file.