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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> (and not just blindly copy-pasting the 4MB binary blob)

Where is this 4mb claim coming from? I just built a hello world on macos in release mode, with no special flags and the result was 400kb. Thats absolutely larger that it should be, but its a lot smaller than 4mb.

Is it really that much worse on linux?

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Macho executables don't contain debug info. Just references to .o files.

You are looking at the aftermath. Also, you could have manually put `strip = "debuginfo"` to avoid the 4 MB binary even before that; the issue is about the default when no `strip` option was given.

No, this is using stable rust 1.75. The binary is not stripped at all, and its still 400kb, not 4mb.

Actually my issue is with including the stdlib in its entirety, sorry for not clarifying.

Indeed we could always strip the binaries and I've done so on every Rust project I worked on.

You are aware that the stdlib is linked with --as-needed which tells the linker to not include unused code, right? The entire stdlib is not included in Rust binaries unless you use the entire stdlib. However, as this article shows, that does not apply to debug info.

Actually I was not aware, thanks for clarifying!

Hrm, I read the comments of another user who contributes to Rust and it seems there is various formatting / panic / abort / symbol and location translation code that contributes to the size and currently there is not much that can be done about it.

Oh well.

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