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Comment by SBullet01 | Hacker News Reader

I think the point he tried to make was that if only "hello world" produces a 1.3 megabytes executable, the file size of a fairly complicated program made in Go will be significantly larger than the same program implemented in another language.

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Which makes no sense, anyway. The reason a Hello World program in Go is large is because it must include the baseline runtime support that is included in any Go program. A 10 line program won't be 13mb.

That's like trying to predict the cost of a flight by cost per mile using a quote from SFO to SJC as a baseline.

I'm looking at an executable of a medium program I'm working on, probably around 5k LOC of my own code, using tons of standard library modules and linking to probably another 10-20k LOC of 3rd party libraries, all debug symbols in place. Weighs 5MB. I don't think this program in C++ would weigh much less.

Anyway it can be improved, but to me there are far more important things to be improved about Go than the binary size of small programs.

A dependency parser (in other words, serious program) in Go, linking in some external dependencies and a C++ machine learning library (statically):

  % du -k eval/eval
  2040	eval/eval

  % strip eval/eval
  % du -k eval/eval
  1864	eval/eval

Don't just assume. Measure.

You're right - it will be significantly larger. But then again, it doesn't depend on your system having all of the necessary libraries of the correct version and the overhead of dynamic linking.

It's a tradeoff, and worth it in my opinion.

That's not a reasoned point then.

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