Are you building in "release" mode? The debug builds can be 10x bigger.
cargo build --release
But yes, I have tried my own custom debug profile that turns on the optimisations to try to get the size down. The final binary is smaller, but `cargo build` still regularly leaves me with just kilobytes of space remaining, and then fails outright until I `cargo clean` and try again (which I think is build script related).
If you're building a docker image for example Rust is going to be smaller.
Sure, I could probably halve that by forking every dependency so they aren't duplicating versions, but that's a lot of work. (It's a shame Rust doesn't let you do conditional compilation based on dependency versions, or this would be a lot easier. As it is, we have to resort to the Semver trick: https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick/ — not that many people do that, so it's functionally useless.)
Take GanttProject as an example. It's 20.6MiB of files, plus the JVM. I challenge any of you to make a Rust version (with accessibility support in the GUI) that can open (something resembling) its XML files and draw some (vague graphical Proof of Concept) representation on the screen (with editable text fields), in less than 114+21=135 MiB of binary. And then tell me how, because I've been trying to do that kind of thing for over a year.
¹: I can get it down to around 8MiB with release mode, lto etc., but that significantly increases the build time and only about halves the weight of the intermediate build files.
How dare you claim a larger binary...
Let me guess; Go?
That would come at some kind of compile time or efficiency cost since you couldn’t anymore optimise for those but I’m sure that’s something one could opt for.
I don’t think binary size matters though. Storage is very cheap these days.
At least the prices are almost normal again, now that Chia's over.
You could also have self modifying code such that the size of the binary automatically changes as needed.
If you ship a lisp interpreter instead of rust, you can have the interpreter recode itself and any lisp files to a smaller size. You’d just implement a compression algorithm that preserves the functionality of the code compressed.
I think you could do that with rust too with a self compiling binary. It’ll require some real technical skill but if you hire a real hacker you can pull it off.
My cousin his solution for the competitive programming contest had something like that.
I do have a project a bit like that, but I'm not using Rust for it. I was trying to make my own language (like Rust, but more powerful and also smaller), but I'm probably just going to use a modified (safer) C.
If I were to write it in Rust, I'd have to compile it in the first place… and if I could do that easily, I would simply use Rust.