zlacker

Remember that BASIC, Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Ada, and LISP were used in the past for OS's and system software on machines with almost no hardware by today's standards. Ada, Java subsets, and Astrobe's Oberon are still used in embedded systems today.

What makes today's software bloated is the crud built-up over time, standardization, security, reliability, a trend toward easier maintenance/productivity over raw speed, and so on. Here's [1] a simple program that got trimmed down to mere bytes. You can see how much overhead the aforementioned items add to C code which, by itself, produces very efficient assembler. For people wanting a middle ground, there are High Level Assemblers such as Hyde's HLA [2] and I've speculated we could do something similar with LLVM's bytecode.

[1] http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...

[2] http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/HighLevelAsm/H...