Cargo

“This isn't C, you don't need to manage all of those builds individually. That's what the build system is for.”

“The only thing I'd like to see is the ability to programmatically limit transitive dependency count or depth in Cargo.”

“cargo as a tool beats any language tooling for any language with similar breadth”

“NPM (and cargo/PyPI et. al.) continues to think it can short circuit this requirement for human labor.”

“Notably, crates.io / cargo has some of the same issues as NPM and the verbiage of their excuses for not fixing these problems is oddly similar.”

“Cargo isn't immune to this, as much as I love Rust and wish more shops used it.”

“Cargo and the crate ecosystem are a dream compared to the lack of any easy-to-use build tooling”

“it's pure pain for distros like Debian who don't want to use cargo at build time”

“cargo because its adjacent to C and C++ in terms of being a low-level compiled language used for systems programming”

“a build.rs is a lot easier for me to read and understand (or even modify) if needed because I already know Rust”

“It just also almost always works flawlessly (and the script itself has a standardised name), so you don't notice most of the time.”

“the lack of dependency hell until I hit a c/c++ component somewhere in the build is the real winner”

“that I don't ever need to tell it which files to compile or where to find them”

“use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack”

“In practice this means using language-specific package management (uv, cargo, etc) and ignoring the nix way.”

“some choices imposed by the build system (like cargo allowing multiple versions of the same dep in a workspace)”

“Cargo is your build system, package manager, test runner, doc generator, and publisher in one coherent thing.”

“some package managers (including Cargo and npm) confusingly treat 0.1.0 → 0.1.1 like a "minor" update, despite the spec”

“NPM, PyPI, Cargo et. al. continue to think they can short circuit that process and still ship safe software, and they verifiably cannot.”

“Cargo is great as long as it is only Rust code and there is little need to interop with platform SDKs”

“I love that cargo unifies the ecosystem, no quabble over one shitty build tool over another.”

“Something like Cargo does all of this for you, which is why people prefer it to calling rustc directly.”

“the big adv Cargo/Rust has is learning from past mistakes, and taking good ideas that have come up; discarding bad”

“I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system”

“cargo is just so damned good at such important things that it's hard to imagine a better tool”

“Cargo compiles and runs build.rs for all dependencies, and there's no real alternative which doesn't.”

“The result was a famously well-designed toolchain that the entire community praises.”

“Frankly, the whole cargo side of rust has the same issues that node has, and that's silly beyond comprehension.”

“there is a tradeoff between "one first-class package manager and build system" and "lackluster support for various build systems"”

“The big thing that makes me like Rust is that I've never had that experience with cargo.”

“the benefits of Cargo in quickly building complex projects cannot be overstated”

“I'd take Maven or Cargo any day over anything in the JavaScript or Python ecosystem.”

“Cargo's cache is ridiculously massive (half of which is debug info: zero-cost abstractions have full-cost debug metadata)”

“any new dependency being added (or even updating an existing one) can in practice cause a dependency to get bumped”

“you should also not trust pypi, rubygems, cargo and all the other programming language package managers.”

“I haven't run into the "five versions of serde" problem, but I can easily imagine it.”

“none of those should be putting their stuff (especially temporary junk) directly and unsegmented into $HOME”

“you can run cargo doc to generate & open the documentation of your project and all your dependencies”

“Cargo handles package management, building, testing, documentation, and publishing.”

“virtually every software package of any version is available to you in cargo or npm”