I would like to add the following item to the agenda call for the next Rust sync call:
Dependencies Background: As the dependency stack gets larger, it will be harder to use DataFusion as an embedded query engine and the compile / dev times will get higher. As we expand the supported functions of DataFusion this problem is likely to get worse. For example https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/9243#discussion_r575716759 and https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/9139 Proposal: Add Rust "features" to the datafusion crate and make many of the new dependencies optional (so that we had features like regex and unicode and hash which would only pull in the dependencies / have those functions if the features were enabled.) This approach has worked well for Arrow (which has only chrono and num as required dependencies)
