It’s not just crates.io. I have a minimal, no Libc, no runtime dependencies Windows project for fun that compiles to a tiny executable of only a few kilobytes.

It’s not just crates.io. I have a minimal, no Libc, no runtime dependencies Windows project for fun that compiles to a tiny executable of only a few kilobytes. If you’re going down this minimalist/better C route, you increasingly have to avoid large parts of the Core library as well, which is becoming more bloated by the minute. The culture seems to move in the direction of “avoid unsafe at all costs” (even where that makes the API so complicated that it hurts correctness in practice) and “avoid dynamic dispatch at all costs” (even where that hurts performance).