Cache Rules Everything Around Me, and bloated executables generally put more stress on the instruction cache, resulting in poorer performance. Of course, this

Cache Rules Everything Around Me, and bloated executables generally put more stress on the instruction cache, resulting in poorer performance. Of course, this is just an approximate general rule, and extremely small binaries (and generally any "pointless" experimentation) like this are mainly interesting from a learning point of view (or for small embedded microcontrollers), e.g. understanding syscalls and program start-up, and, for the write-up you link, the ELF format. (Not everything has to be inherently useful for an actual task.)