@underlap I'm going to have to spend more time on this. I tried cargo build --release, and it complained that I didn't have a Cargo.toml file, so I created a basic one that looks like this:
[package]
name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"
[[bin]]
name = "HelloWorld"
path = "hello_world.rs"
The build created a directory called ./target with a release directory under it, which contained the binary and several other files. It was still 13MB.
Strange. What's your OS? And regardless of the answer, maybe you can try building in a Linux Docker image and comparing? Let's see if a clean environment gives the right result.
It should give for Linux under 4 Mb for debug builds and under 600 Kb fir release ones. And then there are ways to squeeze more when it matters:
@mike That's odd. If you want to chase the problem, create another project using cargo new --bin, check that produces a much smaller release binary, then play spot the difference with your project.
@mike My favorite language, Julia, has a similar issue. It's statically compiling everything it needs together by default to ensure portability. In particular the Rust runtime is pretty substantial (and the case of Julia is even worse since it includes all of LLVM).
You can tell Rust to knock it off and do dynamic linking, but then the target machine will need the Rust runtime installed.
There are other options as well, but I'm not a Rust expert so I don't know the details.
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