In the world of C, how many libraries just vendor their dependencies, so they're just not easily visible in a dependency tree?

The problem with your framing is that you look at this as a "dependency addiction." But that doesn't fully explain everything. The `regex` crate is a good case study. If it were a C library, it would almost certainly have zero dependencies. But it isn't a C library. It exists in a context where I can encapsulate separately versioned libraries as dependencies with almost no impact on users of `regex`. Namely, it has two required dependencies: regex-syntax and regex-automata. It also has two optional dependencies: memchr and aho-corasick.

This isn't a case of the regex crate farming out its core functionality to other projects. Indeed, it started as a single crate. And I split its code out into separately versioned crates that others can now use. And this has been a major ecosystem win:

* memchr is used in all sorts of projects, and it promises to give you exactly the same implementation of substring search that the regex crate (and also ripgrep) use in your own projects. Indeed, that crate is used here! What would you do instead? If you were in C-land, you'd re-roll all of the specialized SIMD that's in memchr? For x86-64, aarch64 and wasm32 right? If you haven't done that sort of thing before, good luck. That'll be a long ramp-up time.

* aho-corasick is packaged as a stand-alone Python library that is quite a bit faster than pyahocorasick: https://pypi.org/project/ahocorasick-rs/ There's tons of other projects on crates.io relying on aho-corasick specifically, separately from how its used inside of `regex`.

* regex-syntax gives you a production grade regex parser. More than that, it gives you exactly the same parser used by the regex crate. People have used this for all sorts of things, including building their own regex engine without needing to re-create the parser (which is a significant simplification).

* regex-automata gives you access to all of the internal APIs of the regex engine. This is all the stuff that is too complex to put into a general purpose regex library targeting the 99% use case. As far as I know, literally no other general purpose regex engine has ever attempted this because most regex engines are written in C or C++ where you'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting it because dependency management is such a clusterfuck. Yet, this has been a big benefit to other folks. The Yara project uses it for example, and the Helix editor uses it to search discontiguous strings: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/9422 (Instead of rolling your own regex engine, which is what I believe vim does.)

This isn't dependency addiction. This is making use of separately versioned libraries to allow other projects to depend on battle tested components independent of their primary use case. Yet, if people repeat this kind of process---exposing internals like I did with the regex crate---then you wind up with a bigger dependency tree.

Good dependency management is a trade-off. One the one hand, it enables the above to happen, which I think is an objectively Good Thing. But it also enables folks to depend on huge piles of code so easily that it actively discourages someone from writing their own base64 implementation. But as should be obvious, it doesn't prevent them from doing so: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/ea99421ec896fcc9a...

Good dependency management is Pandora's box. It has been opened and it is never going to get closed again. Just looking on and calling it an addiction isn't going to take us anywhere. Instead, let's look at it as a trade-off.

I like your trade-off framing, but I do think that your argument fails to take account of something important here, which I'll try to illustrate with an example.

Let's say I want to run a simple modern web stack. In C#, I might pull in ASP.NET and EF Core. In Java, I might pull in Spring. In Rust, I might pull in axum, axum-server, rustls and sqlx. From those four deps alone, and before I have written a single line of code, I now have a three hundred and fifty-two line long `cargo tree`. There are three things to note on this.

First, and most obviously, this is far too many dependencies of dependencies, and this is before I add in a lot of other crates I'll need to work with this stack, or for my business logic. I can't seriously rely on - or even keep up with - a dep tree like this for a single and relatively simple project.

Second, a lot of these dependencies are made by anonymous users on github, are documented solely on Discord, change frequently, and do not appear to warrant a high degree of confidence. If Rust continues to gain traction, we will absolutely see security issues à la Pollyfill.JS or xz. For my livelihood, I'm necessarily going to place more trust in Microsoft's ASP.NET or VMWare's Spring than in @animewaifu420's three dozen half-abandoned packages and their 'dank' Discord.

Third, despite pulling in twenty-five times more dependencies than Alpine requires to run an OS, this is actually an extremely barebones web stack. No code-first database migrations, no authentication or authorisation, no internationalisation, no named routes, just to take some random basic features - all of this requires further crates (and, in turn, many dozens of further dependencies of dependencies.)

I'm using web as an illustrative example here, but this is an issue that permeates the ecosystem. I've faced similar issues for other use cases as well.

I like your trade-off framing, but I respectfully think it comes out strongly against Rust from an end user's perspective, at least at this point in Rust's history. I also think it elides over something important - the fact that Rust need not actually be like this. There's no reason Rust couldn't, in the future, have fully-featured crates, with dramatically curtailed dep trees and wide industry buy-in. But it's just not there at this stage. And so I return to my initial post - I quite like Rust, I've previously used it for years, but the ecosystem is years away from a sufficient level of maturity for me to feel inclined to return to it for any significant work at this stage.

Our dependency trees in `uv` and `ruff` at Astral are bigger than this. We rely on it and keep up with it. We do not spend most of our time dealing with the dependency tree. (Although I do think our compile times are longer than would be nice.)

> For my livelihood, I'm necessarily going to place more trust in Microsoft's ASP.NET or VMWare's Spring than in @animewaifu420's three dozen half-abandoned packages and their 'dank' Discord.

If this ends up being true, then that means there is financial incentive to provide something more holistic, right?

I don't know what "dank" Discords have to do with anything here.

From my perspective, I see a lot of derision and vague feelings in your commentary, but little hard data. Tons of production web applications are built in NodeJS on orders-of-magnitude larger dependency trees. Tons of peoples' livelihoods depend on it.

To be honest, I have a lot of the same feelings as you. I don't like large dependency trees either. But that tends to be more connected to tangible problems like compile times.

> There's no reason Rust couldn't, in the future, have fully-featured crates, with dramatically curtailed dep trees and wide industry buy-in.

There's no reason C couldn't have better dependency management either, right? But it doesn't. And the problem isn't just technical.

> but the ecosystem is years away from a sufficient level of maturity for me to feel inclined to return to it for any significant work at this stage.

I suspect the ecosystem is more mature than you think it is, particularly if your understanding of maturity boils down to just a single number of dependencies. But like, if you had written this comment originally, I probably wouldn't have replied. I don't think what you're saying is totally unreasonable, but I also don't see this changing either. Like, if Microsoft wanted to come in and build a nice web framework for Rust, I think it's very likely it would be built on top of the existing crate ecosystem. I don't think they would, for example, roll their own HTTP implementation unless there was some technical reason that `hyper` wouldn't work for them. I do not think they would do it just to get the dependency count down.

What you're seeing is a manifestation of a million tiny little decisions. Should I write my own URL parser? Or should I use a crate for it that I know is also used in production by a number of large companies? Why would you choose to roll your own? (Again, excepting technical reasons.) You wouldn't. You would use the one that already exists. And this decision procedure repeats over-and-over. Big companies aren't immune to it either.

In any case, I did say "trade off" and not "Rust's way is always better." So my reply makes room for viewpoints like yours, where as I think your original comment didn't make room for a more balanced take. That's why I responded.