Not saying this in defence of Rust or Cargo, but often times those dependencies are just different versions of the same thing. In a project at one of my previous companies, a colleague noticed we had LOADS of `regex` crate versions. Forgot the number but it was well over 100

That seems like a failure in workspace management. The most duplicates I've seen was 3, with crates like url or uuid, even in projects with 1000+ distinct deps.

That doesn't make sense. The most it could be is 3: regex 0.1.x, regex 0.2.y and regex 1.a.b. You can't have more because Cargo unifies on semver compatible versions and regex only has 3 semver incompatible releases. Plus, regex 1.0 has been out for eons. Pretty much everyone has moved off of 0.1 and 0.2.

The reason he went down this rabbit hole was because he was chronically running low on disk space, and his target dir was one of the largest contributors.

Not sure how he actually got the number; this was just a frustrated Slack message like 4 years ago

A sibling comment mentions we could have been using Cargo workspaces wrong... So, maybe?

He probably just needed to run `cargo clean` occasionally.

But you definitely aren't finding hundreds of versions of `regex` in the same dependency tree.

Your typical Rust project does not have over 1000 dependencies.

Zed is not a typical Rust project; it's a full fledged editor that includes a significant array of features and its own homegrown UI framework.

What is a "typical Rust project", I wonder?

One famous example is ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep). Its Cargo.lock (which contains all direct and indirect dependencies) lists 65 dependencies (it has 66 entries, but one of them is for itself).

Also, that lock file includes development dependencies and dependencies for opt-in features like PCRE2. A normal `cargo build` will use quite a bit fewer than 65 dependencies.

I would actually say ripgrep is not especially typical here. I put a lot of energy into keeping my dependency tree slim. Many Rust applications have hundreds of dependencies.

We aren't quite at thousands of dependencies yet though.

> I would actually say ripgrep is not especially typical here. I put a lot of energy into keeping my dependency tree slim. Many Rust applications have hundreds of dependencies.

Thank you for your honesty, and like you and I said, you put a lot of energy into keeping the dependency tree slim. This is not as common as one would like to believe.

I agree it's not common. But neither are Rust applications with 1000+ dependencies. I don't think I've ever compiled a Rust project with over 1,000 dependencies.

Hundreds? Yes, absolutely. That's common.

Maybe I am just unlucky enough to always running into Rust projects that pull in over 1000 dependencies. :D

In retrospect, I should have kept a list of these projects. I probably have not deleted these directories though, so I probably still could make a list of some of these projects.

Not quite. He is a better developer than most who happen to minimize dependencies, but according to my experiences it is not as common as you would like to believe. Do I really need to make a list of all the Rust projects I have compiled that pulled in over 1000 dependencies? If I need to do it to convince you, I will do so, as my time allows.

> Zed is not a typical Rust project; it's a full fledged editor

Funny that text editor is being presented here as some kind of behemoth, not representative of typical software written in Rust. I guess typical would be 1234th JSON serialization library.