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by jeroenhd 1152 days ago
Rust can be the same size if you put the same code into the binary, sometimes even smaller.

The problem is that it's real easy to just add a bunch of crates to an application, similar to the nodejs/Python approach.

Most people slso don't seem to turn off many parts of the standard library they don't, even for platforms like WASM. Maybe it's useful to have a stack unrolling panic handler during debug but in release you can just abort and save up to megabytes of space.

There's also a lot to be gained by tweaking the compiler optimisers. By default the optimizer is multithreaded, which makes compiles quite a lot faster, but reduce that to a single thread and suddenly a lot of optimizations can happen that wouldn't happen by default.

I wouldn't write code like described here in C, but I imagine Go and C# are better choices here. Maybe even that Java library the name of which I can never remember, or that Kotlin project that compiles Kotlin to Javascript with super easy interaction between frontend and backend.

I love Rust but if you're going to pick a systems programming language for your frontend, just make desktop supplications. Web is a nice fallback but if it's your primary target, there are so many better options out there.