Why are Go and Rust so huge?

For Go, I downloaded the tar.gz installation, extracted then analyzed with WinDirStat because I happen to be using a Windows machine for my client today. On my personal machine I would have used QDirStat to the same effect.

200mb is taken by .a files which I think are precompiled standard library binary files: https://i.imgur.com/t18ueSX.png

100mb is taken by precompiled tools: https://i.imgur.com/OnX1g5l.png

My guess is that Go has quite the standard library and tools embedded with it, hence the size.

You're only getting started. Those sizes become insignificant once you have a few projects. The data explosion is real and reminds me of RAM usage spiking when OOP became a thing, with performance dropping of a cliff at the same time.

as usual depends on the needs, they've their divided/classified parts to download and install/build on github. They're, in addition to the both, such as elixir, perl, ruby, haskell, raku, nim, etc

OP' size is for entire complete package