[pornel]

> What leads you to believe that the lack of alternatives leads to enabling "a lot of cool tooling"?

Rust projects have settled on Cargo, which gives them uniform way of building, testing, getting dependencies, docs generation (https://docs.rs), IDE support, etc. (https://lib.rs/development-tools/cargo-plugins)

Contrast this with C which has several compilers and plenty of build systems to choose from, often more flexible and advanced than Cargo, but the fragmentation means that C projects are snowflakes, and tooling needs to be configured for each project and compiler combo. For every build system X there's someone who says it sucks and you should be using Y instead.

However, I don't think GCC will cause similar fragmentation problems for Rust, because there are already 100K rustc+Cargo packages in existence, so it has no choice but to follow and be compatible with them.

[surajrmal]

Cargo is not universal. Many projects use rustc directly with an alternative build system such as bazel, make, or meson as they are in multilingual repos. The fact these projects exist doesn't affect your experience with rust. The fact a gcc tool chain for rust will exist should similarly not affect your experience.