Redundant Dependency Builds

[kumawatdarshan]

Many crates in the project declare the same dependencies with slightly different versions or feature sets. This causes Cargo to build multiple separate copies of the same crate, which:

Increases build times.
Increases disk usage for target/.

Can lead to transitive dependency bloat.

For example, the project has crates using serde = "1.0.219", serde = "1.0", some with feature derive while some with derive and rc, resulting in dozens of redundant builds.`

Proposed Improvement

1. Use a Cargo workspace dependency:

Define shared dependencies in [workspace.dependencies].
Crates can reference them with serde = { workspace = true }.

1. Unify versions and features:

Decide on a common version and feature set per dependency (like "derive" and "rc" for serde).
This ensures Cargo compiles each crate once, reusing builds across the workspace.

1. Optional per-crate overrides:

If a crate truly needs fewer features, it can still declare an independent dependency, but this should be the exception.
Like in euclid and analytics, we could override serde to have the "rc" feature. It is not a feature we want to be available in most scenario. But then again, smaller build times is much more desirable.

Trade-offs

Feature union

Cargo will merge features across crates. If some crates need extra features, all crates get the union, slightly larger builds. (not really sure how impactfull this could be)