Also remember that standard .NET runtime does a little bit more than Go's runtime, so it might happen that even with trimming, for basic applications Go ends up having an upper hand on file size.

On the other hand, I have had Go static binaries grow up to 200 MB and being require to use UPX to make it manageable, e.g. trivy.

Also note that triming only works properly if the libraries have taken the effort to be trimmable, as the linker errs on the safe side and won't trim unless certain that it is really dead code, and not called via reflection.

    dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishAot=true

- There is no point in chasing smallest possible binary size if it trades off performance and features one wants to use in production scenario, or comes with other tradeoffs that sacrifice developer productivity. I don't see anyone complaining about the size of GraalVM native images. As long as binaries are reasonably sized, it's not an issue.

- dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishAot=true definitely produces smaller binaries than Go as of .NET 8 (and no, you cannot use the argument that it's not released yet - it's in RC.2 which is intended for evaluation for adopting .NET 8 scheduled for release next month)

I have built a Win32 desktop app with its core logic in Go; and then re-built from scratch using .NET (v7). The core logic involved a fairly complicated keyboard input processing based on bunch of config files.

- Final binary of .NET ~ 14 MB

- Final binary of Go ~ 2 MB

And I was upset that they were so big. Sometimes I used UPX. Or I kicked out all Delphi GUI libraries, and created the GUI with the Win32 API calls directly. I got 50 KB Hello Worlds.

15k May 3 2019 quickrun.exe*

Win32 GUI Application that spawns Window and ask for alias to run. Pure Win32 API, written in C (Mingw).

I literaly looled at 11MB hello world of .net or 1.2MB Go..

I do not have Windows 98 anymore. But I still have Delphi 4 installed under Wine, so I just tried it out.

Just showing a messagebox from windows gives 16k

Using the sysutils unit though, puts it at over 40k. And with classes, it becomes 57k. Not sure what they pull in. sysutils contains number/datetime parsing and formatting, and exception handling. classes has basic containers and object oriented file handling.