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Comment by nwellinghoff | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. What are the practical implications for this? Would it ever be wise to deploy these techniques for a commercial program? Is the end result more memory efficient during execution?

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A small binary size is at least useful when running code in web browsers via WASM. Granted, 2 KByte would be way below diminishing returns, but even a couple of hundred KBytes is rare with high level languages like C# which usually require a big runtime.

Even "we care about binary size at all" would be a major step forward for most "professional" applications.

I’m using some of these techniques to minimize the size of my executables for use with a AWS Lambda and on embedded Linux projects.

The problem with video games and binary sizes is that the assets (3d models, audio, etc) take far more space than the binaries. And its much harder to compress then while still getting good loading times and high quality.

That's a bit of a separate problem since assets can be downloaded as needed in the background while the game is already running, but to even start the game, the first thing that's required is the WASM asset blob so that should be small.

Ah that is true, I forgot that you could stream assets via web in a browser. But, surely if you can stream the large assets quickly enough for a decent experience (even with caching) then the initial blob size isn't going to take too long to download in the first place?

Back in 2000 my team and I compressed our c++ web browser that ran on BlackBerry pagers down to I think it was 56 kilobytes.

We needed it to be that small because he pager didn't have very much storage. Neomar microbrowser, we called it. We were quite pleased to get this thing so tiny, with basically compiler flags and a few recoding steps.

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