[neonsunset]

Go's 2MB is just a hello world executable. Same for C# (it's about 1.4ish MB now).

Once you start referencing heavy dependencies like networking stack or bits of async runtime, the binary will get larger. 8.5 MB while very optimistic (it will be usually larger for back-end applications, which is different to parent comment's IoT scenario), it is actually not far off what you'd get with Rust's Tokio + Axum + Serde + Reqwest and auxiliary crates to replicate the functionality that base ASP.NET Core offers.

[schemescape]

Good point, I was thinking of Hello World.

Regardless, < 10 MB for a nontrivial program is a huge improvement. Maybe I need to revisit C#…