> And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. On source-based compilation systems like Homebrew (OS X), darcs

> And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. On source-based compilation systems like Homebrew (OS X), darcs depends on ghc, and ghc is huge (in both disk space used and compilation time). I suppose you could make a comparison to rustc - also huge, and a dependency in such a system for anything written in Rust; anyone interested in using this library is writing code in Rust, so wouldn't it be a little hypocritical to have a problem with big dependencies? Well, maybe. Personally I think Rust would significantly benefit from a way to compile to portable C code, for precisely this reason. (I know that this is harder than it sounds.) It's true that end users can just obtain the library from crates.io, though, for purposes other than browsing (which is possible with Cargo but not convenient).