[Surfactant7]

> Riff is a tool that we built to help developers write software without having to wrangle dependencies or complicated configuration. It’s built to enable you to clone a project and get to work in seconds. ...

The title specifically mentions Rust projects. The main competition there is Cargo, which does exactly what the quote above claims. It's not at all clear what Riff offers over Cargo.

[cmyr]

I mean, it is expressed pretty clearly in the article; it uses Nix to manage external dependencies, and manages setting link paths and other build bookkeeping.

[Surfactant7]

Thanks. I scanned right past the most important part for the article to get get right, mainly because it was buried in a paragraph, and wrapped in parenthesis no less:

> ... But unfortunately they’re not so great at installing dependencies written in other languages (we call these external dependencies). ...

I'm sure it's a fine project. However, the article itself is not great at explaining the value proposition.

[edave64]

It is fairly clear that it's not in competition with cargo, since it is literally based on cargo. It installs dependencies that are not managed by cargo, apparently mainly C dependencies.

[bombela]

external means non-rust dependencies here.