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Since you made a mention of CMake, does Rust really provide an alternative for building multilanguage projects? When I went to look for examples on how this is managed, it seemed horrendous. For example, some projects manage this by writing a program to download, unzip, and build the source:

https://github.com/elrnv/ipopt-rs/blob/master/ipopt-sys/buil...

Others just assume that the libraries are there, but they still require a program to compile them:

https://github.com/cmr/openblas-src/blob/master/build.rs

As long as all of the dependencies are in Rust, things appear nice. At the same time, unless I'm missing something, it seems like crates manages multilanguage projects poorly. Though I have some major gripes with CMake, I've managed multilanguage projects mostly well.

Is there a sane way outside of CMake to manage a multilanguage project with Rust?

Not so much with Rust in the driver's seat. Cargo, Rust's primary toolchain, only has weak support for pre/post build scripts. It's solely concerned with Rust's own dependencies and compilation. In the couple of projects where I've added Rust to a larger project, it's always been bash or node that coordinates the overall build.

You can call a compiler for C/C++ from build.rs. That tooling is currently not very advanced. As far as I know there is no crate to write compile recipes that as easily as a Makefile or CMakeLists.txt.

When I tried this in build.rs, I had to check modification times myself.

There is an opening for a ninja-type crate in Rust.

Check out Bazel: http://bazel.build. I've been using it a lot to build several multi lingual projects that include Java, C++, embedded C, Javascript, CSS, and even Docker images. There are community Rust rules, that I haven't tried yet, but am planning on investigating soon: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

Is there a non-Google alternative for those of us who don’t want our builds spied on?

Indeed. Rust is the only new contender in the field of systems programming, where C++ has to contend with decades of negative mindshare (C++11: "I've changed! I promise!"), and D, well, never really took off (because it started off in the early Internet era as a commercial compiler?).

There is also Zig, which seems nice as a C replacement but still highly unstable, and Jai, which is also a nice C replacement but currently has no publicly available compiler yet... So for the time Rust is the only new systems programming language (And please don’t say Go/Nim is a contender, they’re good languages in their own ways but having a garbage collector disqualifies it fron that categorization)

> Jai, which is also a nice C replacement but currently has no publicly available compiler yet...

If there is no compiler then there is no programming language.

Well, there are videos of code being compiled. But nothing verifiable outside of the Jai team.

If that counts as existing, then cold fusion exists.

Of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion exists.

> Well, there are videos of code being compiled.

There are videos of nazi bases on the moon.

ATS is in a better state than Zig/Jai lol

No language that drops C compatibility while having the same manual memory management is an actual contender.

Yes having a GC is a contender, because not all GCs are implemented the same way, and C did not eliminate Assembly as well.

So if a systems language, with GC, covers 95% of use cases. We can happily use something else for those remaining 5%, while enjoying better productivity and safety.

Companies like Astrobe manage to have enough customers to keep their Oberon compiler for bare metal deployments business alive, just as one possible example.

Midori looked really interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

> You see a lot of people holding up Rust precisely because we've been there for the last 5/10/15/20 years. The day I don't have to write a makefile or build yet another CMakeLists.txt is the day I rejoice.

Ironically, cargo is one of the areas the rust ecosystem falls down completely. Not to mention, there's no ABI...

> What Rust offers is another option in the native, non-GC'd language space.

True, and while this is great in principle for embedded development, not using a GC is overrated.

> Rust gives you the option of dropping down to that level

Well, if you're not dealing with the linker, you're not at "that level"