I’ve seen similar sentiments crop up before, and it’s never been productive. Removing unneeded memory overhead is universally considered a plus, and I’ve never heard someone argue otherwise. At that point, more user complaints or demand affect neither the number of the relevant subset of developers nor the time they have to contribute. If developer-hours does not increase, we’ll just have to make do with the current pace. Separating codegen from the runtime can help a piece of it, but it’d be nice if more people can tackle the large BLAS buffers. For some applications, even resolving those won’t make binaries small enough because the runtime (GC, dynamic dispatch, tasks queue) takes up space too. If you can sacrifice a lot of features, you can try StaticCompiler.jl to approach the smaller binaries, though at that point you might prefer to manage memory in another language (and another cool example I remembered, you can see Arrays being replaced by manually managed MallocArrays).
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