Comment by johncolanduoni
2 days ago
Rust can create statically-compiled binaries on Linux by using musl instead of glibc, but it’s not the default like it is in Go and is as a result not quite as effortless. There are a lot of crates with native dependencies that require slight environment tweaks to work on a musl build. Go on the other hand goes to great lengths to not need to link to any C code at all, to the point of shipping its own default TLS library and cryptographic primitives.
I thought the default for both Rust and Go were to statically compile everything except the dynamic link to libc? And that you could optionally statically include musl with a bit of extra work.
I've never had to do anything unusual with building, but I thought the "almost-ststically-compiled" thing was somewhere Go and Rust were almost identical.
Golang doesn't dynamically link to libc by default on Linux either - it calls the Linux kernel ABI directly (since that ABI is stable). The main upshot of this is that you don't have to worry about the classic glibc version bingo by default, while with Rust you have to go through some extra steps to avoid that.
You and your parent are talking about slightly different things. You are both correct in different ways.
Your parent is saying that, while what you say is true for Rust and Go code themselves, in practice, it is less true for Rust, because Rust code tends to call into C code more than Go code does, and Rust doesn't always statically link to that C code by default.
Oh that makes more sense! That's a bit of a blindspot to me for the pretty bog-standards ways I'd been using Rust and Go.