I loved an article I read the other day by a CockroachDB engineer, Why are my Go executable files so large?. I found myself wondering how much smaller we could make a Hello World application just by writing direct to os.Stdout instead of using the fmt package. So today I put together a little experiment using similar methods as those described in the article.
This little project compares to tiny Hello World apps and inspects the resulting programs.
Clone the repo and run ./compare.sh to build and execute the comparison.
Just in case you don't feel like running arbitrary code you found on the internet the output as of today on a macbook running Go 1.12 are as follows:
Symbol counts: fmt 3514, os 1878
fmt has 87.00% more symbols
Hello, World file sizes: fmt 2056k, os 1360k
fmt is 51.00% larger on disk