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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.

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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".

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.

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