Although it used to be worse, these days a standard Rust “Hello, world!” compiles to just 277 KB on Linux with ‘cargo build --release’ and ‘strip’—5× smaller than the equivalent for Go (and there are games you can play to get it down further).
Oh, that's very cool, I hadn't checked that in ages. Any idea on what Rust does better here? Better link time optimization? Or is the Go runtime just that heavier?
Rust doesn't really have a "runtime" in the same sense that Go does. For example, Rust has no GC.