Thoughts on Rust bloat
To respond to one particular point from the post:> Once you accept bloat, it’s very hard to claw it back. If your project has multi-minute compiles, people won’t even notice a 10s regression in compile time. Then these pile up, and it gets harder and harder to motivate the work to reduce bloat, because each second gained in compile time becomes such a small fraction of the total.This particular problem can be addressed head-on, I think. It would seem feasible to have the compiler to distinguish between the target application (library) and the dependencies. Then it could report the compile times as separate values. This could be built into CI/CD tools as a way to catch application level compile time changes.Of course, this approach wouldn’t tell the entire story, but it would likely serve as a canary in the coal mine at least.