The article is about Rust, but I was commenting on dependencies in general.
Things like --gc-sections feels like a band-aid, a very practical and useful band-aid, but a band-aid none the less. You're building a bunch of things you don't need, then selectively throwing away parts (or selectively keeping parts).
IMO it all boils down to the granularity. The granularity of text source files, the granularity of units of distribution for libraries. It all contributes to a problem of large unwieldy dependency growth.
I don't have any great solutions here, its just observations of the general problem from the horrifying things that happen when dependencies grow uncontrolled.
Things like --gc-sections feels like a band-aid, a very practical and useful band-aid, but a band-aid none the less. You're building a bunch of things you don't need, then selectively throwing away parts (or selectively keeping parts).
IMO it all boils down to the granularity. The granularity of text source files, the granularity of units of distribution for libraries. It all contributes to a problem of large unwieldy dependency growth.
I don't have any great solutions here, its just observations of the general problem from the horrifying things that happen when dependencies grow uncontrolled.