- embedded: you can count in bytes, not Kb, to turn e.g. a led on/off
Mentioning mingw and exe I don't think he was refering to target embedded
I know... Did you grasp what I wrote? But loose the weight of all I/O etc. and it just needs startup code. System.pas is way overblown. You can strip-out 95% (e.g. KOL's sysdcu for Delphi) of it when needed. You'll end up with about the same size as a C program that doesn't use any libraries: bytes, well within a KiloByte. But you need skills to do so. NativeNT will not help very much: it is basically Windows with ~5% of the code linked in.
And most definitely will lead to more questions about why things do not work (yes, they stripped any convenience for a couple of bytes and then want it back!)..... Especially Pascal programmers do not compare like for like... (and learn to compare their code to C code). FPC makes it actually possible to come very close to - or better - than C if you know WHY your minimal executable is larger than a minimal C program.... Not many people here, not even experienced ones on this forum, do..
Such questions always arize... They are always by people who do not understand what is happening. They are always by people who want the convenience of everything that is in system.pas but do not want the ballast... You can hear them squeel...