History

pkgr started as a Deno prototype, then was ported twice to compare what each language costs for the same tool. Only the Rust port is maintained. The other two are archived under the ports-archive tag: old/ the Deno prototype, go/ the Go port, and rust/ the Rust port before it became the repository itself. A tag, not a branch, because nothing builds from there.

Implementation	Binary (bytes)	Third-party dependencies
Deno prototype (Cliffy)	n/a	5
Go, hand-rolled	2,180,096	0
Rust, hand-rolled	233,472	1

The Go port is 9.3 times larger, and nearly all of the gap is the runtime: a Go hello-world is 1,666,560 bytes against Rust’s 104,448. Subtract each floor and the actual pkgr code is only 4 times apart.

Go needs no third-party module because it reaches the Win32 console through syscall.NewLazyDLL in its standard library. Rust needs windows-sys for the same bindings. Go wins on dependency count. Rust wins on size by an order of magnitude.

All three were measured on one machine with one toolchain.