Static linking of the C runtime in Rust

By default, Rust on Windows with MSVC toolchain compiles to a dynamically linked C runtime, apparently following the default configuration on Visual Studio, which uses the /MD compiler flag. In order to use static linking for the C runtime, we must change this to /MT, something I’m used to do in my C++ Visual Studio projects.

I found notes about Rust linkage, which hints us specifically about these /MD and /MT switches, although not citing them explicitly. The way to specify static linking is through RUSTFLAGS environment variable:

RUSTFLAGS='-C target-feature=+crt-static' cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Which is rather ugly, let me say. At least it appears to work, and this is the command line I’m using for my release builds now.