A while ago I wrote a minimal replacement for top called ltop using Claude Opus 4.6-4.8. At first I made it so that I could nicely filter the processes to just the ones I wanted, but then I noticed the binary was pretty small, and got curious if it could be smaller... 🧵
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Now the binary is under 32KB on Linux and Mac, and uses a RAM base of 44KB on Linux and 224KB on Mac. Tons of unsafe rust, #![no_std], raw assembly for syscalls, custom formatting, arena allocators, etc.
Maybe 50% whether Fable will find any security bugs?
A while ago I wrote a minimal replacement for top called ltop using Claude Opus 4.6-4.8. At first I made it so that I could nicely filter the processes to just the ones I wanted, but then I noticed the binary was pretty small, and got curious if it could be smaller... 🧵
Obviously useless, though I did learn a bunch about low-level Linux and Mac OS details (the latter disallows static linking, infuriatingly). But it does reflect a nice property of the new world: massively overly engineered software is cheap now! 🎉
https://github.com/girving/ltop 🌳
Now the binary is under 32KB on Linux and Mac, and uses a RAM base of 44KB on Linux and 224KB on Mac. Tons of unsafe rust, #![no_std], raw assembly for syscalls, custom formatting, arena allocators, etc.
Maybe 50% whether Fable will find any security bugs?
Anyways, I probably should wait have waited until a vacation to make this open source, but it was important to do it before Fable reappears again to preregister the test.
Obviously useless, though I did learn a bunch about low-level Linux and Mac OS details (the latter disallows static linking, infuriatingly). But it does reflect a nice property of the new world: massively overly engineered software is cheap now! 🎉
https://github.com/girving/ltop 🌳
