About a decade ago I used a Zipit Z2 as my primary machine, as a fun experiment. It had 32 megabytes of RAM. Back then, that meant you could just about run Debian (who needs X11 anyway). Believe it or not, I often compiled software on this thing, and I quickly noticed that projects written in C would generally compile, while C++ builds would invariably choke from memory exhaustion. This was actually the first time I became aware of any difference between the two.

A very educational experience!