Comment by gizmo

Did you notice how nobody in this thread has argued that rust should optimize for binary size or that rust is somehow wrong for having made the trade-offs that it did?

People who have only worked with languages that produce large executables are likely to believe that 300k or so is about as small as an executable can possibly be. And if they believe that, then of course they'll also believe that a serious program must therefore be many megabytes large. If you don't have a good grasp of how capable modern computers are then your estimates will be wrong by orders of magnitude.

There are countless of examples -- you don't have to go that far back in history to find them -- where dozens of engineers worked on a complicated program for years that compiled down to maybe 500kb.

And again, the point still isn't that we should write software today like we had to in the 80s or 90s.

However, programmers should be aware how many orders of magnitude slower/bigger their program is relative to a thoroughly optimized version. A program can be small compared to the size of your disk and at the same time 1000x larger than it needs to be.