GNU Hello

The latest version is a 488K archive.
488K compressed for a hello, world application.

If it was about an order of magnitude difference, I'd say binary size could matter, since it could mean the difference between keeping them on disk or cached in RAM. Or between a single read and reading multiple fragmented blocks.

Do the Gentoo peops have some OMG optimized way of doing the localization at compile time? They really ought to.