It's ultimately Rust's reliance on generic code that forces us to deal with so many packages at build time. In idiomatic C/C++ much of the reusable code you compile ultimately turns into reusable shared objects, that sit in binary form on your fs with their corresponding include files. This is only possible in rare cases with Rust, because the "library" equivalents (crates) don't know how their generic types and code will be instantiated downstream. Everything is the equivalent of a "header only" lib.