The purpose of the translation item collector is to find all monomorphic instances of functions, methods and statics that need to be translated into LLVM IR in order to compile the current crate.
So far these instances have been discovered lazily during the trans path. For incremental compilation we want to know the set of these instances in advance, and that is what the trans::collect module provides.
In the future, incremental and regular translation will be driven by the collector implemented here.