Thoughts on Rust bloat

Language design and compiler implementation are definetely high-competency skills, but they don't necessarily correlate with library design skills.

For instance, http client and server libraries are often in this gray area of uncertainty about whether they should be in the stdlib or not. Is this something language designers or compiler implementors have a lot of experience in? I would say not; sending and serving http requests are not something compilers need to do. Or take GUI libraries, what do language designers know about that?

I also know of many bad third party libraries, but there are tons of examples of really awful parts of standard libraries. The original date/time APIs in Java are a mess (they finally fixed this by in essence bringing in a third party API). The ssl bindings in the Ruby stdlib were a common source of bugs back when I was paying attention to this (maybe they've fixed it), same thing for the built in http stuff. Someone else mentioned the similar weakness of python's built in http, such that most people use a third party library instead. Even the java collections APIs are pretty poor such that people often augment them with things like guava or apache libraries.

My point is just that developing good libraries is a hard thing and I don't see any reason to think language designers or compiler maintainers are any better (or worse!) at it than other people. There isn't really a shortcut, you can't just cede authority to the powers that be on the core language teams, you just have to evaluate the quality of libraries for your use case yourself.

But two minutes is still a lot of time to wait for a build, especially if you’re doing gamedev and want to prototype something fast.

It seems nalgebra is the culprit here: because Rust doesn’t yet support const generics, it has to use some hacky type-level metaprogramming to represent numbers, and that will definitely destroy build times.

There's a cost to discovering the consensus choices that I think inclusion in a standard lib minimizes. But there may be other similarly good ways to accomplish this. If I'm remembering correctly, doesn't Rust have a set of libraries that aren't in the standard library but are somehow vouched for? Maybe that's a similarly good approach to solve the discovery problem, I'm not sure.

You might be looking for `cargo install cargo-bloat`

    $ cargo bloat
    Compiling ...
    Analyzing target/debug/mdbook

    File  .text     Size                 Crate Name
    0.5%   1.3% 166.4KiB                 regex ::captures_read_at
    0.5%   1.3% 165.2KiB                  idna unicode_normalization::tables::compatibility_fully_decomposed
    0.3%   0.7%  95.0KiB               ammonia html5ever::tree_builder::TreeBuilder::step
    0.3%   0.7%  92.5KiB                  idna unicode_normalization::tables::canonical_fully_decomposed
    0.2%   0.5%  64.6KiB               unicase unicase::unicode::map::lookup
    0.2%   0.5%  63.4KiB                  idna unicode_normalization::tables::is_combining_mark
    0.2%   0.4%  55.8KiB                 regex  as core::iter::traits::iterator::Iterator>::next
    0.2%   0.4%  55.5KiB                 regex regex::re_unicode::Regex::find_at
    0.1%   0.3%  41.7KiB unicode_normalization unicode_normalization::tables::composition_table
    0.1%   0.3%  36.2KiB               rand_hc rand_hc::hc128::Hc128Core::sixteen_steps
    0.1%   0.3%  33.8KiB                 regex regex::re_unicode::Regex::shortest_match_at
    0.1%   0.3%  32.4KiB               rand_hc ::generate
    0.1%   0.2%  31.4KiB               ammonia html5ever::tokenizer::Tokenizer::step
    0.1%   0.2%  24.5KiB                  idna unicode_normalization::tables::canonical_combining_class
    0.1%   0.2%  21.8KiB                 regex aho_corasick::ahocorasick::AhoCorasick::find
    0.1%   0.2%  21.6KiB                 regex aho_corasick::ahocorasick::AhoCorasick::find
    0.1%   0.2%  21.0KiB                  clap clap::app::parser::Parser::get_matches_with
    0.1%   0.2%  20.3KiB                    ws ws::io::Handler::handle_queue
    0.1%   0.1%  19.0KiB                    ws ws::connection::Connection::read_frames
    0.1%   0.1%  18.7KiB            env_logger termcolor::Ansi::write_color
    35.3%  91.6%  11.4MiB                       And 58189 smaller methods. Use -n N to show more.
    38.6% 100.0%  12.5MiB                       .text section size, the file size is 32.4MiB

Several attempts have been made at this in Rust in the past, but few people use them. It just adds even more dependencies that you’re not actually using.