Indeed, good observation. Another observation is that 82% of that is debug info.

-OReleaseSmall -fno-strip produces a 580K executable, while -ODebug -fstrip produces a 1.4M executable.

zig's x86 backend makes for a significantly better debugging experience with this zig-aware lldb fork: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/LLDB-for-Zig

I don't recall whether it supports stepping through comptime logic at the moment; that was something we discussed recently.