The vast amount of debug info does make the problem worse, but it doesn't take long before a moderately complex Rust programs grows to 100MB even after stripping.

When I tried to compare Rust programs to their C(++) equivalents by adding the sizes of linked libraries recursively (at least on Linux, that's impossible for Windows), I still found Rust programs to have a rather large footprint. Especially considering Rust still links to glibc which is a significant chunk of any other program as well.

I believe many of Rust's statically linked libraries do more than their equivalents in other languages, so I think some more optimisation in stripping unused code paths could significantly reduce the size of some Rust applications.