So, serde seems to be downloading and running a binary on the system without informing the user and without any user consent. Does anyone have any background information on why this is, and how this is supposed to be a good idea?
dtolnay seems like a smart guy, so I assume there is a reason for this, but it doesn’t feel ok at all.
The same feature is planned for Windows and MacOS. https://github.com/serde-rs/serde/pull/2523#pullrequestreview-1583726636
The build time improvements are so marginal in a production environment where hundreds of crates are built. This decision demonstrates a strange inversion of priorities and smells of premature optimization to me. It’s so odd to see even further optimizations building on this “serde helper process” pattern.