You’re right, it is a feature, but I’d like the option to distribute a smaller binary without everything built in. Roswell supposedly helps with this, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet. Some commercial implementations support this, I think, but they’re priced well beyond my hobby project budget.

Janet is intriguing to me because it has a small footprint (even smaller than most Schemes). I’ve heard it’s handy for building little utilities, especially if you want someone else to be able to run them (a situation I find myself in regularly).

To provide a some extra context for other readers and mostly respond to the GP:

Janet does not do any stripping for distribution -- Janet images compiled to native executables still contain the full compiler/stdlib/runtime/everything in <1mb.