Yeah, I agree with this. This confused me when I first started using the language. I do think there could be some better options for caching or downloading precompiled packages, but I also think this has partly helped with the development effort in Rust as well. That being said, a system wide cached package repo could work, but it also has issues (looking at you Maven) so it would be interesting to figure out how to get it "right" when dealing with source packages.

This old issue discusses a bunch of this: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/610 I couldn't find another in a brief search.

Edit: I should add that it does harken back a bit to my Gentoo days, where recompiling the world for that 10-15% architecture boost was a lot of fun, but also a waste of time in general ;)