> The same dead code elimination that applies to C's inbuilts, isn't yet applied against Rust's. That is false. LLVM uses the exact same dead code elimination

> The same dead code elimination that applies to C's inbuilts, isn't yet applied against Rust's. That is false. LLVM uses the exact same dead code elimination in Rust as it does in C. In fact, Rust's tends to be better, as larger modules mean fewer exported global symbols. If you read the blog post I linked, then you'll see that most of the size is libbacktrace and libjemalloc. You can omit both. If you were to write a C app that used libbacktrace and libjemalloc, then you'd have the same "bloat"; they are not dead code. The problem is not that C has some magic optimization that Rust doesn't have. You can't just ignore the fact that Rust produced a demo that was size competitive. You can't just handwave it away as "abusing a language". You can't successfully argue that you can't produce small binaries in Rust, because we have empirical proof of it right there. Rust was a fine language in which to write that demo. For the same reasons, Rust would be a fantastic language in which to write a libcurl replacement.