Optimizing Rust Binary Size
I develop and maintain a git extension called git-req. It enables developers to check out pull requests from GitHub and GitLab by their number instead of branch name. It initially started out as a bash script that invoked Python for harder tasks (e.g., JSON parsing). It worked well enough, but I wanted to add functionality that would have been painful to implement in bash. Additionally, one of my goals was to make it as portable as possible, and requiring a Python distribution be available flew against that. That meant that I needed to distribute this as a binary instead of a script, so I set about finding a programming language to use. After surveying what was available, and determining what would be the best addition to my toolbox, I selected Rust.
The programming language has a steep learning curve, but has been fun to learn and immerse myself within. The community is great, and I'm excited to find more opportunities to use Rust in the future.
The rewrite took a while to accomplish, but when all was said and done, everything worked, and worked well. I was able to implement some snazzy new features as well as polish some rough edges. However, for how "simple" I felt the underlying program to be, it clocked in at 13 megabytes. That felt like a lot. So, I decided to see what could be done.