I think large chunk of it is from dynamic linker, rather than glibc. At least that appear to be the case according to "file a.out". Adding "-static" option seem

I think large chunk of it is from dynamic linker, rather than glibc. At least that appear to be the case according to "file a.out". Adding "-static" option seems to prevent that: $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o; wc -c a.out 12780 a.out $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o -static $ wc -c a.out 4304 a.out Bulk of what remains is page-size alignment. Linux works with 4KB pages: $ getconf PAGESIZE 4096 ...so it makes sense that gcc (ld, really) aligns to that. But we can dial it down: $ gcc -Wall -s -nostdlib tiny.o -static \ -Wl,-zmax-page-size=64; wc -c a.out 400 a.out ...and a bit more could be shaven by dropping Build ID: $ strip -R .note.gnu.build-id a.out; wc -c a.out 344 a.out This wonderful piece of software: https://github.com/aunali1/super-strip https://github.com/aunali1/super-strip seem to find more things to remove, although not sure what would be that: $ sstrip a.out; wc -c a.out 220 a.out Of course, this is not quite "golfed", and I too, would love to see OP's article updated to x86_64 and current crop of gcc/binutils.