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Comment by anttiharju | Hacker News Reader

I've also been eyeing Rust, but coming from Go where you can build more or less complete cli tools with just the standard library I'm not overtly exited by occurrences like this.

From what I've seen Rust projects seem more or less node-esque in the sense that people just keep pulling all kinds of dependencies, not necessarily even understanding them that much. Like apparently serde the library is responsible for most of the slow compile times people associate with Rust, because deserialization/serialization is kind of a common thing to do in an app.

Happy to be corrected on my statements, not 100% on anything.

edit: apparently the behaviour in Go std library is the same, heh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45022680

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It doesn't have very large standard library. It's just running on a different philosophy on not making the Standard Library "Batteries included". But I find you get less dependencies than npm. Not so many tiny left-pad like microlibraries.

The main cost of compile times is Generics. Rust generics use "Monomorphization" which generate different binary code for every use of a generic type.

serde leverages generics everywhere and it generates the serialization code for every type you make serializable. So when you use `serde_json::to_string(MyType::new())` it follows calls a code path just for serializing MyType to a json string.

The upshot: It's incredibly fast, there's a lot of inlining and other compiler optimisations that can used because of it. No runtime reflection (Which is how Go does a lot of it).

The downsides: Takes a long time to compile cause of all the extra it's generating. Also can inflate binary sizes at bit.

Other languages like Go mostly use run time reflection for Json. Rust doesn't have much runtime reflection so doing it here wouldn't be possible

If you’re allergic to external dependencies then one of the batteries-included languages is better for you.

In practice, there are a lot of well known and well maintained Rust crates for core functionality. It has also inspired some good competition among different crates to serve different purposes, such as the different command line arg parsing libraries.

I don’t find it to be a problem at all, but I know some people get triggered when they install a package and see it download different dependencies.

> From what I've seen Rust projects seem more or less node-esque in the sense that people just keep pulling all kinds of dependencies, not necessarily even understanding them that much.

My experiences as well. Try to "cargo build" any projects, and you will immediately see the node-esque problems. It does not fill me with hope.

Oh yes... I am building Zed.

  Building [=>                      ] 154/1473

Amazing, 1473 dependencies!

Why is this normalized?

1968 dependencies when building with --release. :|

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