438-byte "Hello, world" Win32 EXE in D

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 8 September 2014 at 08:06:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 7 September 2014 at 21:03:17 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
> wrote:
>> The 438-byte "Hello, world" program is achieved using 
>> Crinkler, which is a COFF linker with aggressive compression 
>> and header optimization. It was created for compressing 4K 
>> demos.
>
> Pretty nice! Is the format correct too, or can it break on OS 
> upgrades?

 From the Crinkler manual:

COMPATIBILITY
-------------

The goal of Crinkler is for the produced EXE files to be 
compatible with all widely used Windows versions and 
configurations. As of version 1.4, the EXE files produced by 
Crinkler are, to the best of our knowledge, compatible with 
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, both 32 bit 
and 64 bit versions. They are compatible with Data Execution 
Prevention and with execution hooks that inspect the import or 
export table of launched executables (graphics drivers are known 
to do this).

It is not a primary goal of Crinkler to anticipate 
incompatibilities that may arise in the future as a consequence 
of new Windows versions, graphics drivers or other widespread 
system changes. Guaranteeing such compatibility would require 
Crinkler to follow the EXE file format specification to the 
letter, precluding most of the header hacks that Crinkler 
utilizes in order to reduce the size overhead of the EXE format 
as much as possible. Rather, we strive to continually monitor the 
compatibility situation and release a new, fixed version of 
Crinkler whenever a situation arises that affects the 
compatibility severely (such as a new, incompatible version of 
Windows). This has occurred several times already throughout the 
history of Crinkler.

Each new version of Crinkler not only produces executables that 
are compatible with the current majority of targeted systems. It 
also includes a way of fixing old Crinkler executables to have 
the same level of compatibility. See the section on recompression 
for more details on this feature.

This compatibility strategy ensures that intros made using 
Crinkler will continue to be accessible to their audience, even 
if the Windows EXE loader changes in an incompatible way that 
could not be anticipated at the time the intro was produced.