> Downloading 3GB of dependencies is not a thing that happens in the Rust ecosystem. Reality is orders of magnitude smaller than that.

Assuming they're talking about the built size of dependencies that are left lying around after cargo builds a binary, they're really not exaggerating by much. I have no difficulty of believing that there are Rust projects that leave 3GB+ of dependency bloat on your file system after you build them.

To take the last Rust project I built, magic-wormhole.rs [1], the source code I downloaded from Github was 1.6 MB. After running `cargo build --release`, the build directory is now 618 MB and there's another 179 MB in ~/.cargo, for a total of 800 MB used.

All this to build a little command line program that sends and receives files over the network over a simple protocol (build size 14 MB). God forbid I build something actually complicated written in Rust, like a text editor.

[1] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole.rs

I am not a fan of this as well but you have to consider that a good part of these are caches.

This is why XCode, Android Studio/NDK, VC++ and co have such huge sizes people complain about, compiled binaries for all major variations of compile flags are part of the download.

Also why those GNU/Linux repos are actually multiple DVDs nowadays.

> GNU/Linux repos

I'm not sure I understand your point with these, as of course no one ever installs the complete repository (e.g. all of Debian), because there's a ton of software in it you don't need or want. Assuming you mean the installation media, at the very least Arch Linux is still less than 1 GB.

Moreover, I think the point in comparing the behavior of Rust dependencies with other ecosystems (C, C++, Haskell, Python) is that most of this cruft is left behind in the individual directories used to build the software. I occasionally write programs to solve some problem, or for fun, and usually I have to download nothing at all, because I can rely on the dependencies supplied by my system and already installed on behalf of other programs (yes, I'm well aware that this doesn't cover all use cases). Rust is fundamentally not designed to work that way, and the large build sizes and huge dependency trees have a multiplying effect on that foundational issue.

The download size may not be a big issue, but all those dependencies take up a lot of storage space once they're compiled.

Maybe they meant node_modules as the joke goes.

I think it was a false equivalence between node_modules and Rust. Like any language where developers rely on a package manager to pull in libraries will necessarily be 3GB in size.