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.