I did once spend a few boring hours on a plane on a genetic-algorithm-based optimiser that (tried to) minimise a Linux image (I believe I used Gentoo), eliminat

I did once spend a few boring hours on a plane on a genetic-algorithm-based optimiser that (tried to) minimise a Linux image (I believe I used Gentoo), eliminating packages first, followed by files, segments, and individual lines of code. From what I remember, (a) you can probably get to an extremely low size, (b) it won't be worth it compared to similar efforts taking a different route and getting 90 % there, because (c) your test will never be sufficient for any real-world usage: I remember going through some of the codepaths that had been disabled, and it included handling of specific dates, any unicode character I had not used, handling of networking and disk access failures that I did not even know of, etc.