Yes, it'll require a protoc installation to actually compile, as well as some native dependencies.

Naturally more crates means more time on compilation. Grapl is a pretty large project, lots of services that do different things, so it isn't too surprising that it has a lot of dependencies relative to what I assume is a more tightly scoped project.

For example, Grapl talks to multiple different databases, AWS services, speaks HTTP + JSON and gRPC (with protobuf), has a cli, etc etc.