[nindalf]

> programs which run on top of a massive tree of third party code which has been written by god-knows-who tend not to be very fast or very secure.

You have a point about security, but not about the speed. I can probably link 5 "we rewrote in Rust and it was much faster" articles. All of these used third party libraries. ripgrep for example, is faster than grep, despite having more dependencies. In reality, it just promotes better code reuse without impacting run time speed. If anything, separating your code into crates improves incremental compilation times.

It's possible that you might pull in a large dependency with many features. Compiling all of this and removing the unused code will cause a compile time penalty and no run time penalty. In practice, Rust crates that expose multiple features have a way to opt-out/opt-in to exactly what you need. No penalty at all. In any case, most rust crates err towards being small and doing one thing well.

Examples

- https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2020/04/15/better-stack...

- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/oxidizing-source-maps-with...

[skohan]

I agree that Rust has very favorable characteristics when it comes to performance. My argument would be that language choice is not a panacea. It's certainly possible to write performant code which leans on dependencies, but the style of development which relies heavily on piecing together 3rd party libraries and frameworks without knowledge of their implementation details is not a recipe for optimal performance.