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Comment by unsnap_biceps | Hacker News Reader

This is a great primer on iota but the title doesn't make sense to me. I expected talking about an empty struct that uses zero bytes

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It's a pun on the English definition of "iota": an infinitesimal amount

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/iota

I was expecting the smallest binary possible from go

Which, mind you, got me interested in go. I remember seeing a docker image of 4mb that ran a pretty well server. Not sure if it's still possible or what article it was.

That's impressive.

But perhaps this thing is even more impressive: https://redbean.dev/

It's a single-file webserver that is also a zip file, and that's also a multi-platform executable (that's right, you can run the same file on Windows, Linux, BSDs, MacOS and more). It even includes a Lua interpreter, SQLiteDB, JSON etc.

And it's so fast it's unbelievable.

Version 2.2 was only 2.2MB , but looks like version 3.0 has grown to 5.5MB, not sure what happened!

Still is. I made a basic http responder last week and it was under 4mb static compiled for a scratch docker container. I didn't even have to resort to compression, just stripped debug symbols.

A 3.25inch disk (the one that makes the well known save symbol) held 1.44 megabytes.

These held entire graphical games and now we’re impressed when we can respond to an HTTP request in a binary that size.

Something got lost…

For a lot of newer compiled languages this comes down to static compilation. These aren't linking to any system libraries beyond the OS fundamentals.

That and they have way more debug symbols than Comander Keen, probably.

There was no crypto stuff during the floppy times, and that's a lot of extra code

I'm guessing the title was meant to be a nod toward the meaning of the English word iota, "an extremely small amount".

Also the physically smallest letter of the Greek alphabet.

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