Are you sure it's because they are statically compiled?
Not because each binary has DWARF debug symbols in it so that there are useful stack traces?
> Imagine each binary being 5 mb on average and multiply that by 100.
I don't think it's a factor of 100 times, that seems a bit outrageous.
> I don't think it's a factor of 100 times, that seems a bit outrageous.
I think he means 100 utilities all weighing in at 5mb
Removing DWARF information with -ldflags -w reduces the size of the binary by 20%. The binary is 1.8MB originally...
$ go build hello.go
$ wc -c hello
1806192 hello
$ go build -ldflags -w hello.go
$ wc -c hello
1408880 hello
$ cat > t.go
package main
func main() {}
$ go build t.go
$ wc -c t
623280 t
$ nm t | wc -l
1029
$ cat > t.go
package main
import "fmt"
func main() { fmt.Println("hello world") }
$ go build t.go
$ nm t | wc -l
2541