Performance of Rust versus C

help
1

I am a beginner of Rust.

Rust is described as "fast and memory-efficient" of its performance, but why the exe file seems not like this?

#main.c

#include "stdio.h"
int main() {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

#src/main.rs

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

My compiler is MinGW-gcc. The size of the exe file compiled from main.c is 53k, but that from main.rs is 3474k in release mode. How should I look at the performance of Rust versus C?

2

Benchmark and measure (not the file size, but working memory etc).

For explanation about the file size difference look up dynamic vs static linking.

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3

I don't think binary size is usually included when considering performance, though it can of course be a relevant metric to consider in some contexts. The bulk of the difference is due to Rust binaries being statically linked, I believe. This blog post is a few years old, but still relevant I think: Rustlog : Why is a Rust executable large?

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4

If binary size is a concern, I recommend you acquaint yourself with this github repo: GitHub - johnthagen/min-sized-rust: 🦀 How to minimize Rust binary size 📦.

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5

If you want to have small binaries you can give UPX(https://upx.github.io/) a chance. But please be careful if execution performance and RAM usage. But it creates small binaries with a cost of higher starting time and its using more RAM.

1 Like
6

Thanks for all replies. I think your answer @Heliozoa is exactly what I want, thanks again.

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7

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