Hello World: Minimized to 167 Bytes

This article documents the author's journey to create the smallest possible 'Hello World' program. Initially using Rust, the author discovered that minimizing the binary size required a deep dive into low-level programming. Ultimately, assembly language was chosen, and through clever techniques such as removing debugging symbols and manually crafting the ELF header, a 64-bit Linux 'Hello World' program was reduced to an impressive 167 bytes! The article delves into the file size expansion during the linking process and the details of the ELF file format, making it highly valuable for low-level system developers.