You can strip C compiled binaries too. And that halves the binary size. The point is for example a hello world Rust binaries is 300kb after striping while C compiled one is 15kb. A difference of 20 times.
i.e. all programs are larger by 275KB, not larger by 20x.
Rust doesn’t have the privilege of having a system-wide shared stdlib to make hello world executables equally small.
The overhead comes from Rust having more complex type-safe printf, and error handling code for when the print fails. C doesn’t handle the print error, and C doesn’t print stack traces on error. Most of that 200KB Rust overhead is a parser for dwarf debug info to print the stack trace.
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fff25cb8000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fe5f08d9000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fe5f0ae2000)
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffc109f9000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f8eda404000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007f8eda222000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f8eda4a8000)
Dynamically linked libs rarely contribute heavily to binary bloat
More generally, you statically link something to avoid distribution hassles of various kinds, not because you care about the specific number.