Personally it wouldn’t bother me that the Rust development package has to be installed. That’s something a programmer has to be prepared to do IMO.
But I do understand that for example in CI/CD and build / production servers people would appreciate no extra compilation work – and Rust can be slow there – so I would rather support the move to Rustler precompiled and the minimum Elixir requirement to be bumped to 1.11.
Alternatively, you can have a second package e.g. meeseeks_precompiled but that would likely increase the load on you?
Just wanted to put in a +1 for going with Rustler precompiled and increasing the minimum required Elixir version. I’d love to be able to eliminate the rust dependency.
In production when whole deployment process definitely doesn’t take few seconds? Sure! But just think about tiny Elixir scripts (like simple scrapers) with something like 50-100 LOC. A tiny Elixir script designed for quickly doing small tasks should not “setup environment” or do literally any bigger job.
This release adds NIF precompilation using rustler_precompiled (a big thank you to @philss for all his work on that).
This also changes the supported versions drastically, mostly as a result of wanting to keep up with Rustler, which is now supporting 3 versions of Elixir and Erlang/OTP back.