(...HN formatting fail, imagine shell output showing the nixpkgs bash binary is 1.1M, the brush binary is 6.9M...)
with no prospect of further amortizing that size through shared libraries. Without shared libraries the only chance I see for rust being used to replace base system tools is with multi-call binaries a la busybox.
Hello world is really large, and it's unamusing how so much of the standard library is creamed into the resulting binary, no matter how trivial...
Do you know the current status of dynamic linking? I guess the lack of ABI stability is the big blocker, right? Probably no use in formalizing the linking bits if the goal posts keep moving. So it seems like the big problem is some committee will never complete the task... Because it will never be perfect... Something like that.
Probably the wrong place to ask, but where is the claim that static compilation is "hurting battery life" coming from? More efficient use of CPU caches because frequently used shared libs are more likely to be cached? Or less allocations in RAM maybe?