Run the demo called “Elevated” (or watch the video). I have no words. 4KB self-containied executable. It rings a faint bell as if I’ve seen it before, but I think that’s just my soul leaking into the universe.
The renders at that size are crazy. Can’t run the ‘Elevated’ demo here in wine.
Oh, that’s disappointing, I ran it on my Windows box after watching the video. I can confirm that the music in the video is part of that 4K extravaganza too! I have extremely recently given up programming and taken up knitting. 
Very nuts. How in the hell? I guess decades of obsessed persistence matters.
Yeah, it’s just bonkers from start to finish.
Snookoda, what has been your experience with programming graphics?
I’ve dipped a toe into graphical stuff over the years, bit of a n00b with all of the matrix and shader sorcery but can confidently display an OpenGL triangle nonetheless.
How I have read it, getting to the point of getting something on the display via OpenGL a huge first hurdle.
Yeah modern OpenGL is a bit more long-winded than it used to be. There are several ways to skin the cat in modern versions too, but it’s all ultimately about giving the graphics card a bunch of matrices stored in buffers and shaders to go along with them.
I’ve heard that “time to triangle” is longer in Vulkan, which is what everybody who is anybody is moving on to.
It does make you wonder how small could an os an applications be. But also, would the code be practically decipherable for longterm development?
There’s a bunch of maths making those kind of shadery demos, even a couple of help files would be bigger than 4KB. But there are tiny OSes, even Linux has things like Alpine with an 8MB install package. CP/M runs on 20KB of RAM but I don’t know how much memory and storage space all the modern stuff needed for TCP etc would take.
The world’s smallest OS that can talk to the outside world with modern protocols would be interesting to hear about.
Well Windows 11 has borked those demos, either that or it’s the new 'pute, but they work on two other Ryzens.
Maybe they have introduced something new in compatibility mode?