This reminds me of a very short-lived wave in Windows application development. Application bloat was deemed to be endemic, and frameworks like Microsoft's MFC certainly didn't help. So alternatives were sought. For some, just using bare W32 in C/C++ or with some minimal wrappers (Microsoft did have an STL=ish ones, IIRC) was enough. But a surprisingly large community started developing apps in assembly!<p>Not sure how much of that is still available. But due to and early Palm devices, assembly had a short-lived renaissance and (small) size was important.<p>Nowadays? Well, what's the average size of an iOS/Android app?