Is there a Rust tool that can automatically find 'dead' dependencies in Cargo.toml? I.e. things Cargo.toml adds as a dependency, possibly imported / use crate_name::* in src/*.rs, but never actually used by any code ?
The unused_crate_dependencies lint can do this, to a limited extent.
Caveat: it only takes rustc's perspective, not cargo's, so it has a one-crate view of things. This means that a dependency only used by your examples/tests/benches will be a false positive. But, if you enable it temporarily, then you will at least discover candidates for removal.
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I've not used this before -- so the newb question. This technique involves adding
#![deny(unused_crate_dependencies)]
to the top of src/lib.rs , followed by 'cargo check' ?
Generally yes. I wouldn't recommend using deny instead of warn, though, because that means it's aborting the compilation which in principle might get you a less complete answer (though I don't think it will in this situation).
It's also not actually necessary to modify the file. You can run rustc with warning options:
cargo rustc -- -W unused_crate_dependencies
This is useful if there are any false positives, so you can run it as a special case but not get the warnings usually, without modifying the file and undoing.
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