Over time I’d worked on several projects, and compiled many more that I was looking into and after a while I noticed that the folder where I kept my projects was several gigs larger than I expected. So, I checked what the largest folders were and noticed all of them were target folders in rust projects. I needed the space at the time so I manually cleaned it up. Time passed and it built up again… so needed a better solution. I remembered that Jon Gjengset used a shared build folder from one of his streams and inquired if he’d run into any issues. Based on him not having had any issues using it I decided to try it and found that it worked out pretty well for me.

It has made it much easier to see how much space is being used by the build folder and much easier to delete it if needed. It also reduce the total size as multiple projects that required the same crates wouldn’t each need to have their own copy which sped up build times and saved space.

I’ve since heard of cargo sweep from Conrad Ludgate. I found this relevant post while looking for the project’s crate.io page.