I thought 20MB was a lot.

I did "nano debian size" on google and one of them mentions - The Nano package contains a small, simple text editor which aims to replace Pico, ... Download size: 1.5 MB. Estimated disk space required: 20 MB.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/nano....

That's not true for Debian either:

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/nano

But building from source is a different story, if you stripe and clean build dir it will be similar to prebuilt .deb

gccgo + upx can reduce the size of Go executables considerably, usually below 1M.

note that it does not reduce the memory size once loaded (and even prevents sharing pages when several instances are run since memory is written when decompressed, not read as a program binary is)

> even prevents sharing pages when several instances are run since memory is written when decompressed, not read as a program binary

A shame the linux kernel doesn't have some way for packers to say "I am a packer, I run with access to nothing except the binary, therefore run me with no permissions and then share the pages I make with any user that executes me. If you like, you can even delete my output and reunpack me on-demand"

That would be something!