I'll happily pay the price of bigger binaries for things such as the %v format.
I don't write hello, world that often, or even care about its size when I do. One demo we used to do for Unix was show we could write an executable program that was 2 bytes. It was cute. Did it matter, in the end? Not really. But we used to call 4k programs bloated. I have a hard time worrying about 1M binaries on $200 machines with 12 GB/s memory bandwidth and 4G memory. It's 2013. ron
