Rust has macros that allow for arbitrary compile-time generated code, just like Zig. Most Rust-compiled programs are a bit bloated because libstd is statically linked and not rebuilt from scratch with a project-specific trimmed feature set, which leads to potentially unwanted code being included for e.g. recoverable panics, backtraces, UTF-8 string handling etc. A set of new RFC's is being worked on that may at some point allow libstd to be rebuilt from scratch within Stable Rust projects, with well-defined, stable, subsetted features.
> Rust has macros that allow for arbitrary compile-time generated code, just like Zig.
This is not true. Zig, D, and Nim all have full-language interpreters built into the compiler; Rust does not. Its macros (like macros generally) manipulate source tokens, they don't do arbitrary compile-time calculations (they live in separate crates that are compiled and then run on source code, which is very different from Zig/D/Nim comptime which is intermixed with the source code and is interpreted). Zig has no macros (Andrew hates them)--you cannot "generate code" in Zig (you can in D and Nim); that's not what comptime does. Zig's comptime allows functions written in Zig to execute at compile time (the same functions can also be used to run at execution time if they only use execution-time types). The Zig trick is that comptime code can not only operate on normal data like ints and structs, but also types, which are first class comptime objects. Comptime code has access to the TypeInfo of types, both to read the attributes of types and to create types with specified attributes, which is how Zig implements generics.
