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Ask HN: What languages/ecosystems offer the smallest container sizes?

4 points by nighmi ↗ HN
(Inspired by this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653340 and Whartung's observation that Linux forums used to bring up packaging the run time.)

What languages can fit in the smallest container with a functioning e.g. echo server?

More interestingly: What's the smallest production container you've seen and how was it accomolished?

You can build scratch containers with just a Go binary, which packages the runtime in about 1.5MB, not much more for an echo server.

With Racket (a Lisp/Scheme) you'd need to package a minimal OS like Alpine Linux and then minimal Racket (without the IDE etc.), giving you about 80MB.

I don't know Rust, but I've seen some containers around 10MB in it. I expect they can get much smaller when not packing so much functionality.

A quick Google shows a toy C container under 1KB! [1]

What's rhe smallest you can do with the JVM? Or Nim, Zig etc.? Perhaps a Fortran or Ada container? [1] https://blog.hypriot.com/post/build-smallest-possible-docker-image/

5 comments

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gregjor
C, Rust, Go binaries are not containers, if you mean something like Docker. A VM is not a container either. You need to make a clearer distinction between compiled languages with no runtime (C), compiled languages with a runtime component (Go, Rust), languages that run in an interpreter with a runtime component (Python, Ruby, PHP), languages that run in a VM (Java, C#), and containers (Docker). You can run anything in a Docker container but you don't have to.
nighmi
How could I make that clearer? I explicitly asked about what language ecosystems offer the snallest production containers and gave examples.
gregjor
Your question was not clear to me because it conflates containers (Docker) with runtimes and VMs.

No container at all will give the smallest production container, so a compiled language with no runtime (C) or one with a small runtime (Go) answers your question.

If you must use containers for some reason, the container stuff (e.g. Docker) imposes a constant overhead regardless of the contents, so you can set that aside and just add up the size of the application binary plus runtime plus dependencies. C will likely come out at the top of the list, .NET and Java at the bottom.