Thoughts on Rust bloat

One recent case we saw a similar tradeoff was the observation that the unicase dep adds 50k to the binary size for pulldown-cmark. In this case, the CommonMark spec demands Unicode case-folding, and without that, it’s no longer complying with the standard. I understand the temptation to cut this corner, but I think having versions out there that are not spec-compliant is a bad thing, especially unfriendly to the majority of people in the world whose native language is other than English.

In the Python world, you can install an "extra" along with a package. So you can make the deliberate decision to omit Unicode case folding from your CommonMark parser. Maybe something like that is possible with a crate?

That said, I think this is a non-feature in the spec, if anything. I see the value in recommending (but not requiring) Unicode normalization, but I don't see the added value of Unicode-aware case-insensitivity. Maybe it's more important in non-Latin text.

I think it is a little ironic that he speaks of performance culture but simutaneously advises to use dynamic dispatch and avoid polymorphism. I can see the justification in non-critical code paths, but serialisation is a pretty important part of most networked software nowadays so I do not think that smaller binaries and faster compilation times (better developer experience) justifies a performance hit in the form of dynamic dispatch through crates like miniserde.

I'd say that this is more of a culture thing rather than a language thing.

It's a complex trade-off of runtime performance, code clarity, productivity, safety, binary size, and compile times. Rust tries hard to eat all the cakes and have them too, but it can't do miracles.

And looks like the author is on the right track to tackling the problem — moving less common functionality behind feature flags, pregenerating data "offline", profiling and trimming code with the help of cargo-bloat.