The Cargo Team is running an experiment enabling the -Zembed-metadata=no feature by default on the nightly channel to address one of Rust users' top complaints: large target directories consuming excessive disk space. This change aims to reduce duplicated crate metadata in build artifacts without requiring users to sacrifice debug information or incremental compilation performance.
Background
The 2025 State of Rust survey identified high disk usage of compilation artifacts as the second most reported problem after compilation speed. Cargo uses pipelined compilation with .rmeta files to accelerate builds, but this can lead to duplicated metadata across crates.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Aug 19, 2026 at 02:39 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10