The vast amount of debug info does make the problem worse, but it doesn't take long before a moderately complex Rust programs grows to 100MB even after stripping.
When I tried to compare Rust programs to their C(++) equivalents by adding the sizes of linked libraries recursively (at least on Linux, that's impossible for Windows), I still found Rust programs to have a rather large footprint. Especially considering Rust still links to glibc which is a significant chunk of any other program as well.
I believe many of Rust's statically linked libraries do more than their equivalents in other languages, so I think some more optimisation in stripping unused code paths could significantly reduce the size of some Rust applications.
The vast amount of debug info does make the problem worse, but it doesn't take long before a moderately complex Rust programs grows to 100MB even after stripping.
When I tried to compare Rust programs to their C(++) equivalents by adding the sizes of linked libraries recursively (at least on Linux, that's impossible for Windows), I still found Rust programs to have a rather large footprint. Especially considering Rust still links to glibc which is a significant chunk of any other program as well.
I believe many of Rust's statically linked libraries do more than their equivalents in other languages, so I think some more optimisation in stripping unused code paths could significantly reduce the size of some Rust applications.