on mine it is 1,354 KB. I prefer the 10x LOC savings over a megabyte of hard drive, but you do you.

But if everything was written in Go it might be 1 megabyte * the number of users of coreutils. Might be worth using a few more lines of code to save a little bit of space on a lot of machines.

It's not about hard drive space, it's about start up time.

The 10x LOC (despite being a huge exaggeration) is also the fixed cost, not the marginal cost. You're only forging main loop and includes, not any fundamental complexity.

This is also a funny argument coming from a Go programmer considering that Go trades off conciseness and expressivity for simplicity. Show me some of your favorite Go and I'm sure we can replace it with some concise C++.

> C++

I just physically shuddered

I bet you did.

This.

In fact, most embedded Linux thingy will be running the busybox version of core utilities instead of gnu coreutils for binary size reasons.

I other words, even gnu coreutils is too big.

Right but that's mostly because it includes its runtime and the C version does not.

It's pretty easy to avoid this problem anyway - just combine multiple tools into one binary like Busybox does.

In any case the simplicity of the Go code is not really related to the binary size.