binary size is scary

[Fiedzia]

I know its a rust issue, but looking at about 3MB for each binary, versus around 100KB for coreutils binaries on my system (ubuntu 14.04), I wonder if there is anything that can be done to cut it down.

[Arcterus]

I don't think there's a whole lot we can do. I mean, we could strip unneeded symbols after compilation, but that doesn't really solve the problem (the binaries would still be huge). IMO, the best we can hope for is the Rust compiler eventually generating smaller binaries.

[huonw]

This is 100% a compiler & standard library issue; the smallest one can get a statically linked executable that uses std is basically 700KB, even with optimisations on, LTO and stripping.

Work-arounds include:

• dynamic linking (compile with -C prefer-dynamic),
• a busybox-style unified binary that includes all the tools internally, and dispatches based on the name with which it was called, to amortize the overhead across everything,
• not using the standard library.

[hexsel]

On the current version of the project, most binaries end up between 271kB - 471kB (stripping on, LTO off due to this bug).

Is there a need to make this any smaller?

rustc 1.4.0-nightly (63ba780fd 2015-08-23)
OSX 10.10.4

[nightmared]

What about shipping a standard library for OS not having rust library and using dynamic linking ?

[nathanross]

see the issue above for more details on this issue, dynamic linking.

[abique]

I like the busybox idea.

[knight42]

duplicated #747