That being said that the argument of size is a bit silly to begin with, especially for a 3MB binary.
For a single app, sure it's no problem, but what about when the thousands of other programs in bin introduce similar levels of bloat? Another one is ripgrep, weighing in at 5MB compared to greps 204kb.
And this is just for fairly simple command line tools, Imagine what life will be like when we have UI toolkits like QT statically compiled into everything.
Did you strip both binaries? If I strip rg after compiling it, it shrinks to 2.7MB on Linux. If I strip the distributed binary on Github (which is statically linked with musl), then it shrinks to 2.4MB.
> Imagine what life will be like when we have UI toolkits like QT statically compiled into everything
I imagine Qt will be dynamically linked, so I'm not sure why you'd say that.
Of course, if you want to statically link something like Qt because it makes distribution easier for $reasons, then that's a different story. But that has nothing to do with Rust.
% du -h /bin/ls
20K /bin/ls
% ls -laF /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 38624 Jul 15 00:29 /bin/ls*