min-sized-rust VS winlamb

This is a good guide on building small Rust binaries: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

This talks about going to extreme lengths on making the smallest Rust binary possible, 400 bytes when it was written, https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind...

The thing is, you lose a lot of nice features when you do this, like panic unwinding, debug symbols, stdlib… for kernel and some embedded development it’s definitely important, but for most use cases, does it matter?

Oh it was 137, haha. I will link you to this older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408906

See also https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

Are you sure? If so then this is awesome news, but I'm a bit confused; the commit in that min-sized-rust repo adding `build-std` to the README was merged in August 2021: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust/pull/30

Are you saying that at that point the feature still hadn't "landed in Rust nightly" until recently? If so then what's the difference between a feature just being available in Rust nightly, vs having "landed"?

Rust binaries are by default nowhere close to 500MB. If they are not small enough for you, you can try https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust. By avoiding the formatting machinery and using `panic_immediate_abort` you can get about the size of C binaries.

A useful reference: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

That must be without stripping. Also there are ways to reduce binary size. See e.g. [min-sized-rust](https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust). I've gotten stripped binaries of small cli utils less than 400KiB without doing anything special, less than 150 KiB by customizing profile settings and compressing with upx, and less than 30 KiB by replacing the std with the libc as the link shows. Haven't tried with fltk though...

This is not quite what you're asking, but it does also address the underlying concern: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

The first thing that came into my mind was: why not simply go fully native, with the aid of something like WinLamb? Often you can roll your own custom controls quicker than a cross-platform library.

With WinLamb it's trivial: just create a field in the class.

However, if you still want to go Win32, this library is a thin wrapper which may save you a lot of time (and sanity). However, it's C++, not C.

I write C++ and raw Win32 for more than 20 years. I'm the author of this, and I'm rewriting my personal stuff in Rust just for fun.

I wrote a very thin C++11 wrapper for Win32 a few years ago, in case you're interested: WinLamb. It won't do everything, it just covers window creation and messaging, and leaves room to plug any other Win32 stuff on top of it.

Take a look at WinLamb source if you want to see how to build a native GUI.

Given my C++ Win32 background, the very first thing I tried was to write a native Win32 GUI app in Rust. It later became the WinSafe crate, which is strikingly similar to WinLamb C++ lib. The Rust experience was awesome. The correctness of the type system was something I really appreciated, things C++ cannot give you.

I write native Windows stuff sometimes, and I use Windigo, which I wrote based on my WinLamb C++ lib. It's a GUI system over raw Win32, so this has the disadvantage that you'll have to learn some Win32... but it has the advantage that you have the unleashed power of Win32 at your fingertips.