> reasonable, 8 kB would be good, and 4 kB would be excellent.

I ran across this paper recently where someone investigated how small an ELF 
executable could be.
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

The quick summary was that a one line C program which did nothing but return a 
constant is about 4kB unless you take drastic measures.
Some of the specifics don't apply to an embedded application (the particular 
example was for an X86 Linux system), but the paper gives a good idea of the 
true minimums achievable.

-- Chris Caudle



