Here's Zig[1] for comparison: $ cat ../example/hello_world/hello.zig const io = @import("std").io; pub fn main(args: [][]u8) -> %void {

Here's Zig[1] for comparison: $ cat ../example/hello_world/hello.zig const io = @import("std").io; pub fn main(args: [][]u8) -> %void { %%io.stdout.printf("Hello, world!\n"); } $ ./zig build ../example/hello_world/hello.zig --export exe --name hello --release --strip $ wc -c hello 5760 hello $ ldd ./hello not a dynamic executable $ ./hello Hello, world! 5 KB. There are a few unfortunate reasons this isn't even smaller, one of them being a bug report[2] I filed in LLVM. Also note that Rust is a lot further along than Zig right now. Zig does not have backtraces or threads yet. But I believe that the executable size for hello world in release mode will not contain backtrace code, or threads, or a memory allocator, even when Zig catches up to Rust in terms of std lib functionality. [1]: http://ziglang.org/ http://ziglang.org/ [2]: https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=27610 https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=27610