A few ps3 games I've seen had 4GB or more binaries.

This was a problem because code signing meant it needed to be completely replaced by updates.

> A few ps3 games I've seen had 4GB or more binaries.

Is this because they are embedding assets into the binary? I find it hard to believe anyone was carrying around enough code to fill 4GB in the PS3 era...

I assume so, there were rarely any other files on the disc in this case.

It varied between games, one of the battlefields (3 or bad company 2) was what I was thinking of. It generally improved with later releases.

The 4GB file size was significant, since it meant I couldn't run them from a backup on a fat32 usb drive. There are workarounds for many games nowadays.

I did, it was a Spring Boot fat jar with a NLP, I had to deploy it to the biggest instance AWS could offer, the costs were enormous

Java bytecode is always dynamically linked.

still, if I remember correctly I had to reserve 6gig of memory so that the jvm could actually start

If you haven't seen a 25GB binary with debuginfo, you just aren't working in large, templated, C++ codebases. It's nothing special there.

Not quite. I very much work in large, templated, C++ codebases. But I do so on windows where the symbols are in a separate file the way the lord intended.

Llamafile (https://llamafile.ai) can easily exceed 4GB due to containing LLM weights inside. But remember, you cannot run >4GB executable files on Windows.