LabVIEW
A virus written in G?
I also thought about the 100MB run time engine. There was a time not that long ago...okay maybe a while ago, where a built LabVIEW exe had the runtime engine embedded in it, so you could just run the EXE on any windows system.
The last version that supported this was 5.x but still. I regularly code in 7.1 (for fun) but I'm not sure I could go back as far as 5 and not miss alot of the tools I've grown accusomed to.
The other thing is that 7.1 was the last version that you didn't need to install the run time for an EXE, just include the run time in the same directory as the EXE and it would also run on any Windows machine. I could probably get a 7.1 EXE down to 8MB including the needed files, still very large for a virus.
A more devious plan would be to make some useful LabVIEW utility, and have one of the VIs have a password protected VI, or have the block diagram missing. Then get LabVIEW users to download and use your code, while having your VI do what ever it is you want. Again it would be limited to the LabVIEW community and the install base for a virus would probably want to reach more people than that.
I did try to write a "virus" in college. All it did was copy the autoexec.bat (remember that) onto it self over and over...yeah it was lame, the idea was that the HD would fill up with junk and that's as far as my plan got. I tested it in a virtual machine, and sure enough the HD filled up over time, then became slow because Windows couldn't allocate more memory for the page file I suspect. Still deleteing that file fixed all problems.
