On the first question -- auto imports is an example of a "heavy" functionality since we indeed need to scan more than is imported in the project, which is why I'm still working on this to optimize properly (it's decently fast, but I want it to be faster before I'll enable it, since it's also something we want to see in completions, and completions must be _very_ fast). Still, we don't need "everything": we only need _reachable_ items in _direct_ dependencies; typically project has much less direct dependencies than transitive ones (e.g. 20 direct dependencies can fan out to 1000 transitive deps), and each dependency usually has less exported items than total amount of items. Finally, for that you only need semantic data (e.g. items) rather than bodies. So while it's a big task (though finding references is still significantly bigger and tougher, because that's where it gets to "it can be anywhere in reverse dependencies bodies), it's not "we need the whole world".
As for the size -- the Rust Glancer artifacts for Rust Glancer itself currently take 225mb. And that's proportial to the project size only, e.g. it doesn't grow over time on its own.
// Crate indirect_dep:
pub struct Foo;
// Crate direct_dep:
extern crate indirect_dep;
pub use indirect_dep::*;
// Crate my_crate:
use direct_dep::$0;
($0 denotes the cursor). You cannot know what to complete without analyzing `indirect_dep`. Add macros to the mix and you're going to get a nightmare (yes, name resolution in Rust is a nightmare).
In fact, you sometimes need to do type inference inside bodies to infer other bodies, because auto traits propagate across opaques. You might say this does not matter because it only matters for diagnostics... But it does not. It can matter for method resolution.
In general, I'm fairly sure that it is just impossible to build a 100% correct analyzer for Rust code without a query system like rustc's (it can be stored on disk, that's a different story). You can go pretty far without - and this will be enough for some people for an IDE! - but not all the way.
As for the size -- the Rust Glancer artifacts for Rust Glancer itself currently take 225mb. And that's proportial to the project size only, e.g. it doesn't grow over time on its own.