I've hit the same thing in Rust, probably for the same reasons.

Isn't the simple solution to use detached debug files?

I think Windows and Linux both support them. That's how phones like Android and iOS get useful crash reports out of small binaries, they just upload the stack trace and some service like Sentry translates that back into source line numbers. (It's easy to do manually too)

I'm surprised the author didn't mention it first. A 25 GB exe might be 1 GB of code and 24 GB of debug crud.

> Isn't the simple solution to use detached debug files?

It should be. But the tooling for this kind of thing (anything to do with executable formats including debug info and also things like linking and cross-compilation) is generally pretty bad.

> I think Windows and Linux both support them.

Detached debug files has been the default (only?) option in MS's compiler since at least the 90s.

I'm not sure at what point it became hip to do that around Linux.