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Comment by 2ton_jeff | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago I did a "Terminal Video Series" segment that also highlights the runtime overhead of 12 other languages, C of course actually one of the best ones: https://2ton.com.au/videos/tvs_part1/

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I was actually surprised for C how expensive that is, I'd expected maybe a dozen or so syscalls to set up the environment the provided runtime wants, but that's a lot of syscalls for not very much value. Both C++ and Rust are more expensive but they're setting up lots of stuff I might use in real programs, even if it's wasted for printing "hello" - but what on Earth can C need all those calls for when the C runtime environment is so impoverished anyway?

Go was surprising to me in the opposite direction, they're setting up a pretty nice hosted environment, and they're not using many instructions or system calls to do that compared to languages that would say they're much more focused on performance. I'd have expected to find it closer to Perl or something, and it's really much lighter.

glibc isn't particularly optimized for startup-time. It also defaults to dynamic linkage which adds several syscalls, and even if it is statically linked, it may dynamically load NSS plugins. (musl gets around the latter by hardcoding support for NSCD, a service that can cache the NSS results).

C11 adds several things that benefit from early initialization (like everything around threads), but GCC had some level of support for most of them before that.

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