[est31]

I too think that precompiling crates won't really solve the problem.

If you compare the compiled artifact (rlib) of a crate with the source code, you'll quickly see that the compiled artifact is much larger than the source code. libglutin-0c732c31a1d003fb.rlib has 8.1 MB while glutin-0.22.0-alpha1.crate has 53 KB.

Most people have shitty internet. And often it's nothing you can do about it because you have shitty ISPs. You can buy a computer with good CPUs and those are usually cheaper in comparison than good internet for a year, at least in many rural areas in the US. It's not just the US, some other countries have it even worse.

Now of course if you have good internet and a bad CPU it's a good deal, so there should definitely be an option to use it, maybe even with autodetection. But I think cargo has too much dependency on the internet, not too little. There should be no manual input required to turn off precompiled crates downloads if it is faster to compile the crates locally.