I don't have a horse in this race, but a programming language that prides itself on "zero-cost abstractions" and then generates a Hello World program that is 90% wasted space doesn't leave a great impression.
> For example, one thing that was noted is that if we strip the debug symbols by default, then backtraces of release builds will... not contain any debug info, such as line numbers. That is indeed true, but my claim is that these have not been useful anyway. If you have a binary that only has debug symbols for the standard library, but not for your own code, then even though the backtrace will contain some line numbers from stdlib, it will not really give you any useful context [...]
Optimizing binary size is a worthy and important goal because some people have uses cases where it matters. If you are not one of those people why fret about it?
But binary size is absolutely a cost. Whether or not it's a cost that matters to you is a different question, but it's still a cost.
Zero cost in terms of CPU and RAM usage during execution time.
Nothing is zero-cost if you look closely enough.