Comment by kees99

Comment by kees99 2 days ago

3 replies

> disadvantages are speed, and garbage collection.

And size. About 10x increase both on disk and in memory

  $  stat -c '%s %n' {/opt/fil,}/bin/bash
  15299472 /opt/fil/bin/bash
   1446024 /bin/bash

  $ ps -eo rss,cmd | grep /bash
  34772 /opt/fil/bin/bash
   4256 /bin/bash
nialse a day ago

How does that compare with rust? You don't happen to have an example of a binary underway moving to rust in Ubuntu-land as well? Curious to see as I honestly don't know whether rust is nimble like C or not.

  • kees99 a day ago

    My impression is - rust fares a bit better on RAM footprint, and about as badly on disk binary size. It's darn hard to compare apples-to-apples, though - given it's a different language, so everything is a rewrite. One example:

    Ubuntu 25.10's rust "coreutils" multicall binary: 10828088 bytes on disk, 7396 KB in RAM while doing "sleep".

    Alpine 3.22's GNU "coreutils" multicall binary: 1057280 bytes on disk, 2320 KB in RAM while doing "sleep".

  • vacuity a day ago

    I don't have numbers, but Rust is also terrible for binary size. Large Rust binaries can be improved with various efforts, but it's not friendly by default. Rust focuses on runtime performance, high-level programming, and compile-time guarantees, but compile times and binary sizes are the drawback. Notably, Rust prefers static linking.