The system library is a challenge to all those using the computer to write their own faster and better routines or to bow to the superior strength and skill of a true master. --http://www.inner.net/users/cmetz/program-like-a-klingon diet libc to statically link programs that don't need all the bloat from glibc. malloc, printf and scanf contributed from Olaf Dreesen. To compile: $ make make should compile the diet libc itself. When make is done, it will have created dietlibc.a in bin-i386 (or bin-ppc, bin-alpha, bin-sparc, bin-ppc or bin-arm, depending on your architecture). In that directory you will also find a program called "diet", which you need to copy in a directory in your $PATH: # install bin-i386/diet /usr/local/bin Then you can compile programs by prepending diet to the command line, i.e. $ diet gcc -s -Os -pipe -o t t.c diet is cross-compiler friendly and can also be used like this: $ diet sparc-linux-gcc -o t t.c diet will then link against dietlibc.a from bin-sparc, of course. diet comes with a man page (diet.1), which you can copy to an appropriate location, too: # cp diet.1 /usr/local/man/man1 After you compiled the diet libc successfully, I invite you to check out the embedded utils (http://www.fefe.de/embutils/) and the diet libc binary repository (ftp://foobar.math.fu-berlin.de/pub/dietlibc/), too. The embedded utils are small replacements for common utilities like mv, chown, ls, and even a small tar that can extract tar files. The binary repository contains a few utilities I linked against the diet libc, for example gzip, bzip2 and fdisk. The license for the diet libc is the GNU General Public License, version 2 (as included in the file COPYING).