It is possible, with a little manual hacking of the linker and some trickery with storing strings in ELF headers, to get Rust to produces 151-byte executable.

It is possible, with a little manual hacking of the linker and some trickery with storing strings in ELF headers, to get Rust to produces 151-byte executable. Yes, a simple "Hello World" winds up statically linking a fairly sizeable standard library, in particular anything dealing with strings has to involve a certain amount of UTF-8 manipulation and the formatting and I/O have a lot of features and thus likely fairly large code size. But for the most part that's just fixed overhead, and you can opt out of using the standard library if you want and produce smaller executables.