Yes, binary packages are a bad idea everywhere. Usually, their justification comes from two sources: 1. Users may not have the correct build toolchain installe

Yes, binary packages are a bad idea everywhere. Usually, their justification comes from two sources: 1. Users may not have the correct build toolchain installed. (Mostly relevant for end-user applications, or native FFI modules.) 2. Building every package from source is slow. Neither justification makes sense for serde-derive. For 1, serde-derive is just regular Rust code, built by their regular Rust toolchain. You already need to have the toolchain installed to use it! Hell, you need the same toolchain to build the wrapper library for the binary! For 2, serde-derive has a tiny dependency tree, and all of those are likely to be shared by any other proc macros the user depends on anyway, so the only thing you're skipping is... compiling serde-derive itself.