> Just to be cautious: Is it a valid question to ask after all? We have hundreds of gigabytes of storage, if not some terabytes, and people should be using decent ISPs nowadays, so the binary size should not be a concern, right?
$ find /usr/bin -type f | wc -l
2254
$ du -sh /usr/bin
445M /usr/bin
If all these programs were written in Rust and statically compiled, assuming only a 600K difference by binary, that would make my /usr/bin 1.3G (or 300%) larger.
But in reality all those programs are dynamically linked against many libraries in /usr/lib, so the difference would be even bigger, with libraries duplicated between all those programs.
Sure, you can dynamically link with Rust too, but then, you hit the other problem that there is no stable ABI (yet?), and that upgrading Rust (every 6 weeks) means recompiling everything.
$ find /usr/bin -type f | wc -l 2254 $ du -sh /usr/bin 445M /usr/bin
If all these programs were written in Rust and statically compiled, assuming only a 600K difference by binary, that would make my /usr/bin 1.3G (or 300%) larger.
But in reality all those programs are dynamically linked against many libraries in /usr/lib, so the difference would be even bigger, with libraries duplicated between all those programs.
Sure, you can dynamically link with Rust too, but then, you hit the other problem that there is no stable ABI (yet?), and that upgrading Rust (every 6 weeks) means recompiling everything.