Executable Size: Rust, Go, C, and C++

I had never been curious on how the compiled languages compare in term of the binary sizes, until recently, when I started digging into C compilation process. In this article, I want to share results of my recent experiment. The Hello World programs in C, C++, Rust, and Go were compiled with static linking. The resulted executable were compared against each other.

The system used for the testing is Ubuntu 18.04, with the following version of the software:

• gcc/g++ 7.5.0
• go 1.15.1
• rustc 1.46.0

Let's look at the results!

Rust

main.rs

fn main() {
  println!("Hello World!");
}

compile

rustc -C target-feature=+crt-static main.rs

result

2844808 Bytes

Go

main.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello World\n")
}

compile

go build -ldflags=-w  main.go

result

1543579 Bytes

C

main.c

#include<stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("Hello World\n");
}

compile

gcc -static main.c

result

844704 Bytes

C++ (Version 1)

main.cpp

#include<stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("Hello World\n");
}

compile

g++ -static main.cpp

result

844704 Bytes

C++ (Version 2)

main.cpp

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
}

compile

g++ -static main.cpp

result

2254920 Bytes

Results Table

Of course, this test is not an objective way to judge the languages. However, it gives you a good understanding of the size of each runtime. I was surprised that Go executable is smaller than C++ with native features. Also, compiler, like gcc/g++, is intelligent enough to tell whether the features are used or not.