Author here. It's a question of beneath the iceberg dependencies revealed by static linking. $ make clean && CC="x86_64-linux-musl-gcc -s -static -DNDEBUG

Author here. It's a question of beneath the iceberg dependencies revealed by static linking. $ make clean && CC="x86_64-linux-musl-gcc -s -static -DNDEBUG -Os" make $ ls -hal bestline_example -rwxr-xr-x 1 jart jart 38K Sep 19 21:41 bestline_example Linenoise grows considerably when statically linked, since it needs functions like printf/scanf, which add footprint without adding a whole lot of value to the library. $ make clean && CC="x86_64-linux-musl-gcc -s -static -DNDEBUG -Os" make $ ls -hal linenoise_example -rwxr-xr-x 1 jart jart 50K Sep 19 21:41 linenoise_example Bestline refactors the Linenoise code so the linker won't pull printf functions into the linkage. That freed up about 30kb of space, which was then used to provide UNICODE and near-feature parity with GNU Readline. It matters because a library that's this low-level and so fundamental to the needs of nearly every program, should impose as few choices upon the user as possible, in terms of what other things they're required to support. For example, many people don't like printf() style interfaces and therefore do not want them included in their address space. The same goes for huge libraries like Curses and ICU that require you to link in megs of code/data just to read a character correctly. You want the value those things offer, but you don't want the baggage if all you care about is just reading a line comfortably. That's where Bestline comes in. It distills the value of all those heavyweight dependencies down into a single .c file focused on reading lines and only reading lines, which everyone can agree on, that's actually tinier than the original library at the end of the day. So you get a better value as a software developer in terms of the code complexity and dependency bloat you need to take on.