Rust executables are only 100% static on OSes that expose system libraries as static libraries, and there are not many of those around, outside embedded systems.
If I could get all of those quality of life things in a language with a garbage collector, I'd probably use that for most things instead. Right now though, the closest options would be maybe OCaml or Swift, one of which doesn't really give me nearly as much in terms of quality of life stuff around documentation and tooling, and the other isn't nearly as streamlined to use on my platform of choice as I'd like, so I'm using Rust unless (or until!) something better for my personal projects comes along.
Even shipping the whole computer on a container, might not do it, because most containers are leaky abstractions the way their Dockerfiles are written.
Sure, you might get a loading error if you try to run your Ubuntu 24.04-compiled executable on Ubuntu 18.04 if you use the default toolchain. tTat’s exactly the same as C or C++, only much easier to fix in rust by rustup-installing the right tool chain.
Compiling on Ubuntu 18.04 and running on 24.04 is absolutely not an issue. Same for windows.
In practice this is really not a problem, especially for cargo libraries that you anyway build from source.
This seems to be a weird hair to split. GP clearly means “a single executable you can run on any install of the target OS without dependencies.” Whether it’s a truly honest-to-goodness static binary that don’t link to libc or libSystem or whatever is important to approximately zero people, outside of internet pedants.
However, it is not achieved in practice with "static" languages like rust and golang for me
I frequently run into dynlib issues with regards to incompatible glibc references when sharing binaries between different OS like Ubuntu and Fedora or even just different versions of the same OS
Assuming you’re talking about rust binaries, this would only happen if your binary is using glibc symbols that don’t exist on an older version of glibc, and then try to run that binary on a system with the older glibc.
But glibc is a red herring here, because rust is only using libc to call syscalls on the host, because that’s how you’re supposed to do it on every OS, and that’s how you have to do it on every OS but Linux. (Only Go seems to want to implement their own syscalls on Linux.)
It’s a red herring though, because even if rust made their own syscalls and didn’t use glibc on Linux, you’d just fail with ENOSYS when these syscalls are used, instead of failing with undefined symbols at load time. If you try to run stuff that was developed against newer kernel features, on a system without these syscalls, you’re going to run into an equivalent issue. (You might get lucky and not need those syscalls in your app, but that’s not always going to be the case.)
Ironically the same folks don't see to appreciate how object files and binary libraries work in static linking, lets make it even better compiling always from source.
