To be fair though, the baseline hello world C++ binary is quite hefty (10s or 100s of MiB - can't recall) & comes with a bunch of command-line options & an HTTP server out of the box. Or at least did when I was there & I doubt it's changed much. All that functionality is to integrate the baseline set of SRE ops tooling that are common to all services that are deployed on Google servers (eg. HTTP server is to support scraping for performance monitoring integration similar to Prometheus/OpenTracing). It's mildly annoying because any command line tools you write pick up all of that useless functionality but it is easy to teach so trade offs.