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It's really a shame that Rust includes the stdlib piecemeal in binary form, debug symbols and all, in every resulting binary.
I do love Rust but binary sizes have always annoyed me greatly and I always had this nagging feeling that part of all programmers don't rake Rust seriously because of that. And I actually have witnessed, several times in the last 2-ish years, older-school programmers berate and ignore Rust on that basis alone (so the author is quite right to call this out as a factor).
Looking at the https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust repo, final binary size of 51 KB when compilation / linking / stripping takes stdlib into account (and not just blindly copy-pasting the 4MB binary blob) is acceptable and much more reasonable. I wouldn't care for further micro-optimizations e.g. going to 20KB or even 5KB (further down the README file).
I also don't use nightly in my Rust work so I guess I'll have to wait several more years. :(
Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).
I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.
Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.
It's funny that it was already considered be “only pay for what you use” when the binaries contained half of H. P. Lovecraft's œuvre.
See issue #13871
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/13871
I exaggerate, point is that we've come a long way and are still getting better.