[X0Refraction]

This was linked from the top comment on the Rust subreddit: https://wiki.alopex.li/LetsBeRealAboutDependencies

I think it makes a good point that some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded. To some degree that is a plus though as you likely trust the maintainers of your OS distribution to provide stable, supported libraries.

As other commenters have said, perhaps this is an area where the Rust maintainers could provide some kind of extended standard library where they don't guarantee backwards compatibility forever, but do provide guarantees about ongoing fixes for security issues.

[zahlman]

> This was linked from the top comment on the Rust subreddit: https://wiki.alopex.li/LetsBeRealAboutDependencies

It was also posted here, shortly before this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43934343

(And several times in the past, too.)

> I think it makes a good point that some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded.

The point wasn't so much about the loading mechanism, but about the fact that the system (especially on Linux) provides them for you; a good amount come pre-installed, and the rest go through a system package manager so you don't have to worry about the language failing to have a good package system.

[palata]

> some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded.

Not in my case. I manually compile all the dependencies (either because I need to cross-compile, or because I may need to patch them, etc). So I clearly see all the transitive dependencies I need in C++. And I need a lot less than in Rust, by a long shot.

[elabajaba]

Part of the rust dependency issue is that the compiler only multithreads at the crate level currently (slowly being improved on nightly, but there's still some bugs before they can roll out the parallel compiler), so most libraries split themselves up into a ton of small crates because otherwise they just take too long to compile.

edit: Also, `cargo-vet` is useful for distributed auditing of crates. There's also `cargo-crev`, but afaik it doesn't have buy in from the megacorps like cargo-vet and last I checked didn't have as many/as consistent reviews.

https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-vet

https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev