Pong, but smol

This is a tiny implementation of the classic game Pong. Like, less than 6.2 kilobytes.

Some things may be wrong here, maybe I missed some optimizations, IDK, don't take this repo too seriously.

How tiny?

We're talking a few kilobytes. The binary is small because we're doing some pretty extreme things to get the size down:

• We're not linking against the C standard library (-nostdlib).
• We're using link-time optimization (LTO).
• We're stripping the binary.
• We're using a bunch of compiler flags to squeeze out every last byte.

The main dependency is SDL3, which we're linking statically.

How to build and run

You'll need Meson and a C compiler.

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
./build/pong

Why?

Because it's fun to see how small you can make things. This is an exercise in minimalism.

We're not masochists

Could we make it even smaller? Sure. We could ditch SDL3 and write all the platform-specific code to open a window, handle input, and draw pixels ourselves by rawdogging kernel syscalls. But we're not masochists. This is a fun side project, not a torture session. We're trying to have a good time here.