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.