Rust has a unique experience. Initially you hate it, right up to the point where you grok it, then you love it because you realize it save you from so many boneheaded errors that C/C++ allow you to do easily. You can still do them in Rust, but you can't do them unintentionally (generally). The borrow checker, the forced composition over inheritance, and the trait mechanisms are major wins.
I tried Rust once and found it pretty interesting. The moment I left was when I wanted to write a simple web scraper, so I found a library, installed it⦠and found out that it had downloaded a gigabyte of dependencies.
I find it incredible that when I try out a project, it easily pulls in a GB of files. It's a space and bandwidth junkie. I long for a lo-fi version, fully UNoptimized but fast.
My doubt is if it'll work over a basic mobile phone connection, and that lots of folks in developing countries, as I also will be soon, will be left out because of this behavior.
Yes, it has a bit of the same problem Node does with NPM.
There are ways to minimize the final resulting binary though, such as link time optimization, stripping symbols, building in release mode, and more. The following does a good job going over the options:
