Post by @Ferk@lemmy.ml

2026-10-26 13:59 UTC

I think what’s being said is that rustc can be used in the same way as gcc (so… through makefiles, cmake and other build methods), without depending on cargo’s registry (your Makefile did depend on cargo registry). They are saying you can use existing tools with Rust, as opposed to making a new tool for Rust. This is something that is used in C widely, why does it not scale well?

Replies (1)

@urushitan@kakera.kintsugi.moe 2026-10-26 16:10

My makefile uses cargo by ripping out the cargo build information from upstream dependencies to manually run, as projects like reqwest and tokio use cargo. My demonstration was that you still would use cargo the build system rather than cargo the package manager (implying upstream registries like crates.io) over a makefile. And yes, you can use existing tools. As mentioned, systemd uses meson, though they need a python hack to get rustc working because it wasn’t working on meson upstream until 5 days ago. So yes, you can use existing tools. And as I said in another comment, for a mature project built in C, it makes sense to frankenbuild rust into the build system. But their example was purely about rust projects, I brought up makefiles to demonstrate how you can’t just slap a makefile into a rust project and it works

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