This article explains techniques for shrinking the size of a Rust static library intended for use with Go. It details the process of removing unused code, optimizing linked sections, and converting LLVM bitcode to achieve a significantly smaller library file. The author shares practical steps and results of the optimization efforts.

The article details a case study where a payment service at TikTok, originally built in Go, faced CPU bottlenecks due to increased traffic. By selectively rewriting the most CPU-intensive endpoints in Rust, the team achieved double the performance and projected annual savings of $300,000 in cloud costs.