it's pretty trivial to create static binaries in Rust, but things like openssl won't compile since openssl depends on glibc.

Two commands to get you running:

1) rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

2) cargo build --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Yes and no, it's trivial unless you use some of the most common libraries that depend on, i.e. OpenSSL, like pretty much anything that talks with the outside world. Then it's painful. (You mentioned OpenSSL in your comment but somehow I missed that part when I replied. My bad.)

One thing Go has going for it is that they have a more complete standard library so you can do without the pain of cross-compiling—which is what you're doing if most of your libs assume you're in a glibc environment but you really want musl.

I know because I recently tried compiling a Rust application that had to run on an air-gapped older Debian machine with an old glibc, and the easiest solution was to set up a debian container, download Rust and compile there, instead of fixing all the cargo deps that didn't like to be built with musl.

I just went through this recently (built a rust binary on my local machine, sent a binary to another person, they reported GLIBC errors, had to rebuild with the musl target, various crates depending on openssl failed) and found that every library that depended on openssl by default also had a `rusttls` feature in the crate that disabled openssl and enabled rusttls (https://github.com/rustls/rustls) instead.

So I just migrated everything over to that (which consisted of enabling the `rusttls` feature for every crate) and made another build with musl. Everything worked perfectly fine, and since it's not a performance sensitive application, there was basically no drawbacks. The binary became a bit bigger, but still under 4MB (with other assets baked into it) so wasn't a big issue.