I think instead of line count, either final binary size or source code size in bytes should be more common in claims of minimalism; the demoscene, for example, always uses binary size.
That metric is game-able, too: you just implement a VM, and only count the instructions to to VM. The rest is one big binary blob of "data", occupying a single node in the AST of the host language.
Now, of course, that's basically cooking the books, but there's a wide gulf between a full VM & smaller, domain specific ones that might not look like VMs. (All or most of data-driven programming, really.)
