Depends obviously but in general small, busybox is statically linked that uses a relatively large swath of libc and you can compare different libc versions some

Depends obviously but in general small, busybox is statically linked that uses a relatively large swath of libc and you can compare different libc versions somewhat by looking at the tags here: https://hub.docker.com/_/busybox?tab=tags https://hub.docker.com/_/busybox?tab=tags. If parent was correct you could link all of musl libc and have 1.3MB or so left over for an actual application. It also depends on the how the code is structured, musl for example is structured not to pull in unneeded objects while the size of the glibc docker container speaks for itself.