Just having found Rust and having read the first two chapters of the documentation, I find the approach and the way they defined the language particularly interesting. So I decided to get my fingers wet and started out with Hello world…
I did so on Windows 7 x64, btw.
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}
Issuing cargo build and looking at the result in targets\debug I found the resulting .exe being 3MB. After some searching (documentation of cargo command line flags is hard to find…) I found --release option and created the release build. To my surprise, the .exe size has only become smaller by an insignificant amount: 2.99MB instead of 3MB.
So, confessing I am a newbie to Rust and its ecosystem, my expectation would have been that a Systems Programming language would produce something compact.
Can anyone elaborate on what Rust is compiling to, how it can be possible it produces such huge images from a 3 liner program? Is it compiling to a virtual machine? Is there a strip command I missed (debug info inside the release build?)? Anything else which might allow to understand what is going on?