rust:1-slim vs rust:1-alpine

The short answer

• rust:1-slim is 108 MB smaller unpacked on amd64 (927 MB vs 1,036 MB, 10% less).
• As a download, rust:1-slim is 327 MB compressed against 352 MB for rust:1-alpine: 1.1× less to pull.
• rust:1-alpine has fewer known vulnerabilities: 0 (0 critical or high) against 1720 (108 critical or high) in rust:1-slim.
• 0 of rust:1-slim's 1720 findings have a fixed version available upstream.
• Base OS: rust:1-slim is built on Debian 13.7 (trixie); rust:1-alpine on Alpine Linux 3.24.3.
• Alpine images use musl libc instead of glibc. Most software runs unchanged; prebuilt binaries linked against glibc (some Python wheels, Node native modules, vendor agents) may not.
• Packages detected: 118 in rust:1-slim, 31 in rust:1-alpine.
• Filesystem layers: 2 vs 3.
• Platforms: only rust:1-slim ships arm/v7, i386, s390x.