serde_derive now ships a precompiled binary. This made a lot of people angry. The crate maintainer finally locked the issue.
To me, the fact that the issue was just outright dismissed by the maintainer without really answering any of the legitimate concerns raised (disregarding the unnecessary personal attacks in a few comments) is pretty concerning. And now the issue has been locked without a really good response.
Can someone explain why one would want to precompile procedural macros? Don’t they get compiled only once anyways, when compiling a dependent crate for the first time? So compile time should be not that relevant?
You’re correct, and that is part of the controversy.
I’ve read the thread; Rust-folk I recognize seem to accept that this was done to reduce compile time without suspecting bad-faith, but I can’t independently verify that.
There’s a post in there where sometime tries to manually compile the same binary to verify that it matches the shipped binary and they were not able to do it, but there could be a good reason for that. Reproducible builds are hard.
Thanks, I hadn’t seen this elsewhere, glad to know about it.
We are trusting too many people