[cmrdporcupine]

It's worth pointing out that you can absolutely use Rust without Cargo and crates.io and the culture that comes with.

You'll be swimming up against the stream. But arguably it makes sense for certain kinds of projects. I'd classify OS kernel and DB internals development as being those kinds of projects, TBH. Keep your dependency set extremely minimal, vendor it, and avoid crates.io entirely.

I don't actually run into nightly requirements... ever? These days.

Progress on language specification is good https://github.com/rust-lang/fls