Even with a lot of knowledge, I suspect a lot of this still took a lot of trial-and-error. For example:

> Turns out that besides the obvious minimum that a managed developer would expect, there’s also a minimum that the CoreRT compiler needs to compile the input. > Let’s skip to the chase and add what’s needed:

There's under a hundred lines here, but figuring it out by (re)running the compiler to get one error at a time would probably take a few hours.

If the author happens to read this: How long did it take to figure this all out? And great job!

I'll definitely be referring back to this for some upcoming work I'm doing where minimizing the footprint would be useful (not to this extreme of course but there's some gems in here for sure).