I really like Armin "food for thought" articles and I'm also concerned with the dependencies attitude in Rust. I like the language a lot, but I cringe when I clone some project and see the number of dependencies... It's really a balance: when you add a dependency you get a lot of code for "free" but nothing is free: now you've potentially new bug/security failure/things to update. It's a balance.

On the article, two random thoughts:

- I like that the Rust standard lib is "tiny" and a lot of stuff is delegated to third-parties crates. I wish crates support namespaces (for instance std) so it's easier to see what dependencies are blesser. For the moment, you can obtain a good name, like http, and squat it forever (http being just an example, don't know if there is an actual crate)

- when you vendor a Rust project, does it vendor also the flag dependencies? For instance, Rand is dependent on Serde because of an optional flag for serializing a random generator. Serde loc should be ignored in that case if we count the code lines.