Ah, yeah, I wasn't trying to shrug off the usefulness of zig, sorry. I think when it comes to compile size zig does it a bit better due to it's smaller std although, when compiling rust with just a link to libc and a printf call I believe you get an exe ~2048b when optimizing for size so I'm not certain how well that scales.

The 100 line hack I used was to noop out the `.idata` section which link.exe refused to merge/shrink, that only saved me 1Kb in the end.

Looking at the section info of the zig exe it looks like there is some black magic going on with it's alignment so I may have to dig deeper to see what zig is doing here. Also thank you both for pointing zig out, I haven't heard of it until now and it may come in handy for something else I'm planning on making :)