[steveklabnik]

My perception is that the initial clone is slow, but that’s it. A detailed comparison with actual numbers would be interesting!

When you depend on a git dep, you can say if you want a particular branch, tag, rev, whatever. So it’s only a clone + checkout. From there you read the Cargo.toml, same as anything else. That’s my understanding anyway, it’s been a while since I poked at the guts.

[greysteil]

You’re totally right - I was thinking of Composer, which does flat resolution for git sources so has to go through the above. Cargo sidesteps that issue completely by taking the head commit or whatever’s asked for :-)