> 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?

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

the rest is pretty much all runtime, the hello world itself should take about 10k, that's more or less the size of the C or dynamically linked Rust versions (Rust also uses static linking by default, and the hello world is 300k in that case)