FWIW: it’s trivial to make minimal binaries, just, nothing optimizes for it for the most part. If you use OpenWatcom v2 with nodefaultlib you can get win32 bina

FWIW: it’s trivial to make minimal binaries, just, nothing optimizes for it for the most part. If you use OpenWatcom v2 with nodefaultlib you can get win32 binaries that are around ~1500 bytes, which is not too shabby when you consider its padded to 512 byte boundaries, and that the PE headers take at least 300 bytes or so if you aren’t overlapping structures. I have a project that implements a regular expression engine, JSON parser and some game patching code into a DLL that is around 10 KiB (iirc) using OpenWatcom. Of course it’s easy if you’re only targeting Windows and 32 bit but you can do similar if you drop the standard library in MSVC.