Anti-bloat side project

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

One side effect of getting dynamic loading working, and being able to
test Perl and Python a bit, is that I've seen a ridiculous level of
inefficiency, especially in Python which is increasingly becoming a
required dependency for many components of a "complete Linux system".
As an example it takes Python nearly 600 syscalls just to run a hello
world program, compared to about 40 for perl or bash and 20 for ash
(and of course about 3 for musl-linked C using stdio). Much of this
was spent searching nonsensical pathnames for config files and shared
library modules. And let's not even get into the memory usage at this
point...

Anyway my idea for a side project to benefit the whole Linux community
(not just musl users) is to document and analyze the causes of startup
bloat/syscall bloat (which leads to bad performance, especially in
"script"-type programs that run many times) and memory bloat in some
core components that are used on most modern Linux-based systems:

- Python
- Perl
- Glib
- GTK
- ncurses
- etc.

and then sending reports (and possible fix ideas) to the upstream
maintainers. This is not something I plan to do myself (I'd rather
spend time improving musl) but I want to propose it as a way for
members of the community to contribute to positive anti-bloat work
that benefits a large number of users, as opposed to the alternative
of just boycotting software that "sucks" for bloat reasons. :-)

Rich