> If you are equally picky and constrain yourself to parts of the ecosystem which care about binary size, you still have more options and can avoid size issues.
What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.
I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.
In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.
[0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.
What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.
I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.
In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.
[0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.
[1] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.24/dependencies
[2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper/0.14.28/dependencies