Was reading and thinking "oh boy this looks so good, I wish it was written in Rust..." and then reached the "Installation Instructions" just to see "cargo install broot". HERE WE GO
Can I ask... why?
What is the difference between a program that makes you feel "oh boy this looks so good" written is some XY language, and the same program with the same functionality written in Rust?
"I sure hope this isn't written in Node."
It means the thing is lightweight and fast. And also - unlikely to crash or eat my drive because of sloppy UB.
Every non-standard tool that you get in the habit of using is another piece of friction when switching machines or using a machine not configured as your own, where you may not even be able to install things. With Rust, I know I’ll be able to get it going easily, regardless of whether it’s in some OS-level package manager: it’ll be a single binary that I can just drop into my personal bin directory, and it’ll just work.
Seriously, the deployment story is just so good for languages that compile into a single statically-linked binary, when compared with dynamic languages.
So my threshold for “will I bother trying this non-standard tool out?” tends to be much lower for something written in Rust. I have several Rust utilities that I take the trouble of installing, and now only one non-Rust utility that I use in this fashion, git-revise (Python, and git-rebase is generally a tolerable alternative if I can’t set git-revise up).
Well then, back to my narrative. I wasn’t actually expecting it to be in Rust (though on reflection, why not?), but when I saw “cargo install broot”, I cackled aloud.
And I’ve just run `cargo install broot`.
Is this experience atypical? I've actually been running through the getting started guide for rust-lang as it left a positive impression on me. Something like this in C land seems unachievable.