I agree, but I thought this thread concerned Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel, which who_would_fardels_bear stated was comprised of more than 15 million lines of code. That is by definition not going to be packed into a "very small coding space."
I don't have anything against GOTOs in very resource-limited environments.
It's been a long time since I had to pack anything into 64K of memory.
BTW, I once wrote code for the RCA 1802, and debugged it with an oscilloscope. Back when Body Heat was brand new, and Kathleen Turner was super hot.
Yeah--that's a lot of code.
My first question, is how much is used in any one installation? A lot of that code is determination for hardware platform. I'd actually like to see multiple versions of the kernel, based on the hardware it's aimed at.
Just separating 32-bit from 64-bit code would shrink it a lot. I know that it does depend on the compiler, but there's quite a bit of code in there regarding that as well.
Also, compiler optimizations and code optimization would be a huge help for shrinking the memory footprint and speed.