[josephg]

> becomes a pain to deal with when you're trying to do something like add packages made in the language to distros, requiring a bunch of hacks

The package managers in distros are pretty awful for a language like rust though. They are designed for dynamically linked C code, not a language like rust where small, developer published libraries are the norm and there’s no dynamic linking. Distro package managers also don’t support rust’s feature flags well (C programs with compile time config often has the same problem).

Apt, rpm and friends’ biggest problem is they’re awful for developers. If I write a program or library for people to use, now I’m expected to test and keep up-to-date packages (or at a minimum build instructions) for like, 6 different operating systems. “On Debian, apt install packages X and Y. Z is also needed but it’s out of date so install that from source. On Ubuntu it’s nearly the same but library Z is usable in apt. On redhat everything is available but named differently. And gentoo. And arch. And nixos. And FreeBSD pkg. Also here’s the configure script. And CMake, visual studio project files, Xcode project files, homebrew and a windows installer too.

What version of rust is even available on Debian and redhat? Is it 2 months old or 2 years old? Do my rust project’s dependencies work on that version of rustc? Are they available in apt? Urgh just kill me.

Cargo means I can just ship my project in the form I use while developing. Users get all the latest packages, chosen by me, no matter their OS. And I know their build environment is sane. Hate on cargo if you want, but cargo, npm and friends are the only sane way to ship cross platform code.