On the subject of symbols:

> Yeah, that’s it. Now, 2308 may be slightly bloated because we link against musl instead of glibc, but the point still stands: There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes here.

Slightly bloated is a slight understatement. The same program linked to glibc tops at 36 symbols in .symtab:

    $ readelf -a hello|grep "'.symtab'"
    Symbol table '.symtab' contains 36 entries: