Reduce dependency tree

[thomaseizinger]

I'll record various efforts in here to reduce the size of our dependency tree where possible.

Tasks

Beta Give feedback

1. refactor: don't depend on multihash features #3514
   +0
2. refactor(interop-test): remove easy to replace strum dependency #3513
   +0
3. refactor(interop-tests): disable unused features #3512
   +0
4. feat(noise): remove tests for deprecated protocol #3510
   send-it +1
5. Remove derive_builder dependency webrtc-rs/webrtc#411
   +0
6. feat: migrate to quick-protobuf #3312
   +0
7. combine is only brought in by redis through interop-test
8. Switch from webrtc-rs to str0m #3659
   difficulty:hard help wanted priority:nicetohave +3
9. Prefer tokio runtime everywhere #4449
   difficulty:easy help wanted priority:nicetohave +3

More suggestions welcome, a good place to start is a timings report by cargo of the entire workspace (minus dev-dependencies): cargo build --workspace --all-features --timings. Once you have identified a (ideally heavy) dependency that we might not need, investigate with cargo tree -i -p <dependency> where it comes from.

[tbu-]

Might it be possible to get rid of the async-std (optional) dependency? I'd guess the ecosystem has moved on to tokio these days, with the last commit in async-std being 9 months ago: async-rs/async-std@bf316b0.

I think this could help cutting down some more dependencies as well.

[thomaseizinger]

I am not following the async-std development but I'd consider that one too established to remove.

Plus, it is optional as you said. I think it would be more fruitful to investigate for dependencies in our protocol crates like yamux, gossipsub or kademlia.

[thomaseizinger]

Might it be possible to get rid of the async-std (optional) dependency? I'd guess the ecosystem has moved on to tokio these days, with the last commit in async-std being 9 months ago: async-rs/async-std@bf316b0.

I think this could help cutting down some more dependencies as well.

We can cut down some dependencies by moving all our tests and examples to tokio. async-std is heavily feature-flagged, meaning we can reduce our dependencies by only activating the bare minimum features needed in the various transports and libp2p-swarm.