My smallest Go CLI is 1.6M. This is probably about as small as you can get in Go and still do something useful. Some of my other (larger) Go CLIs range from ~2.5M to ~6.5M. Go is not known for producing small binaries.
For fun, I made an executable hello world with SBCL and it came out weighing 40MB (no compression, of course); this also includes Unicode data and a complete compiler. Something's wrong here.
I thought Swift compiles to machine code? Can't it eliminate the unused stdlib code?
Well, I guess not if the statically linked binaries are so large, but this seems like the more major reason for these very large binaries instead of stdlib being monolithic? (Not entirely sure what that means in this context)
I think eventually the stdlib will be split up more so that it’s not one giant blob, but there’s a lot of areas that will be reducing in the future.