a linker for making tiny 32-bit linux executables.

Just after making this, I found out that something similar already existed here: https://github.com/Shizmob/smol/ -- although smold's executables are giving me segfaults for some reason. This linker is worse in terms of output size, but the executables are more standard-compliant and don't rely on undocumented ELF magic. The difference isn't even that big (in the 10s of bytes) after compressing with xz -- so if you're using this handy executable unpacker, you'll get about the same output size.

Exit using inline assembly (tests/tiny.c): 93 bytes

Hello world: 369 bytes (252 bytes xz-compressed)

Open a window, get a GL context, and call glClearColor, glClear each frame (tests/sdl.c): 881 bytes (532 bytes xz-compressed)

You will need a rust installation.

cargo install --path .

gcc-multilib/g++-multilib are needed for 32-bit headers for C/C++.

Example: create a file called hello.c containing

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void entry(void) {
	printf("Hello, world!\n");
	exit(0);
}

then run tinyld hello.c -o hello. You now have an executable called hello which prints Hello, world!.

To add libaries, use e.g. tinyld my_sdl_program.c libSDL2.so.

You can use C++, but exceptions probably won't work, and cout/cin don't seem to work either (you should be using printf anyways if you want a smaller executable).

Only 32-bit x86 ELF is supported. If you give tinyld a 64-bit executable it will die. If you're compiling your own object files, you need to add -fno-pic otherwise tinyld will die.

For more information, see tinyld --help.