Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmitrygr 451 days ago
So if I am on a plane at 36,000 feet, I cannot start a new hobby project without paying for WiFi and downloading shit from people I don’t know or trust? That is just unserious, when your competition is the much more mature gcc+make+vim combo, which is 100% offline and self-contained.

And yes, I’ve done this (start a new project in a plane with no internet). Many times. eg: the world’s only PalmOS 5 device emulator (uARM-palm) was started while I was in a plane.

3 comments

You can start a project just fine? Cargo does not require a connection to function - you only need one when it’s time to pull in external dependencies.

And if you really dislike Cargo, nothing is stopping you from using rustc + make directly.

If your hobby project consumes libraries which are not already locally available on your machine, this same restriction would also apply when using gcc/make/vim. (e.g. say you want to use zlib, you'll need the zlib-devel package)

If the packages are already available locally, cargo works offline.

Pretty absurd conflation you've got there.

The package manager just offers a common interface for interop, you can still build without dependencies.