Post by @Ephera@lemmy.ml

2026-10-25 19:35 UTC

Fair enough, I guess. Personally, I don’t really see the point, because there’s hardly any projects that can be compiled with just rustc. I mean, cargo is actually surprisingly useful for normal users, because there’s a decent chance you can compile medium-sized Rust projects without having to jump through endless hoops. But yeah, at that point, you’re adding a nontrivial number of megabytes to user installations for something they might not use. I would guess that even just rustc is larger than gcc and clang, since it implements more sophisticated logic…

Replies (1)

@thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2026-10-25 19:45

Personally, I don’t really see the point, because there’s hardly any projects that can be compiled with just rustc. Because having rustc as a standard tool is not there yet. Off course most don’t expect someone to have rustc only on their computer. I love Cargo, don’t get me wrong. But I think there could be a rise of non Cargo and library dependency projects in future, if the infrastructure (meaning rustc and the standard library can be expected as standard dependency) is available once. Just like not every little project of C requires additional dependency trackers. One could download a project from Git and build it with rustc+make and only the dependencies available in your repository. One of the major issues with the public cratesio is, that not everyone wants to depend on it. In example Linux or other projects don’t use it (as far as I know). So there might be use cases. Just like we use Python and Haskell without additional libraries, or only install them from our systems repository. Maybe it shouldn’t be installed by default. But having an infastructure with basic system packages to install only “Rust” (rustc+stdlib), no cargo, no rustfmt, no rustup. Maybe this will be available once gcc-rust is ready.

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