Comment by rcxdude

Indeed. It's actually been quite handy on a few occasions to be able to just pull in a smaller crate as opposed to the whole project. (in constrast to, say, boost in C++, which is a big mess of a dependency even though it's one that goes to at least a little bit of effort to let you split it up, but through an ad-hoc process as opposed to a standard package management system).

(I would genuinely be interesting in an experiment which pushes this as far as possible: what if each function was a 'package'? There's already a decent understanding of how dependencies within a library work in the compiler, what if that extended to the package manager? You would know exactly what code you actually needed, and would only pull in exactly what was necessary)