ELC + ABS

Professionally developed code can often be shrunk to less than half its original size with a few simple techniques. For example, when the toybox "ifconfig" command was submitted (written by a professional team of experienced developers), the code was 1504 lines (44268 bytes) in 38 functions. After cleanup, the same code was 521 lines (15963 bytes) in 4 functions.

This is a walkthrough of each of the 26 commits applied to shrink that code to 1/3 of its original size, explaining why each change was made and the underlying principles of code simplification.