Rewriting the CLI in Rust: Was It Worth It?

I have rewritten a relatively small but critical 2k CLI from nodejs/ts to Rust, and this was the best decision ever. Cold start and runtime performance got a big boost, but also the code design got much better, and the code is much simpler to maintain and evolve. The single binary install was also a big boost, which I assume is similar to Go.

Since then, we have written all our CLI in Rust, regardless of size.

Tip: for small personal CLI, "cargo watch -x 'install --path .'" can make the whole dev experience script-like.

A big fan of railway app. Recommend others to try the product too, the ease of setup and getting your backend up and running is phenomenal. They also have a very generous free tier.

Sidenote for the railway cli dev team:

I tried installing the rust cli tool recently but when i ran the `railway login` command it broke with this error:

` node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:949 throw err; ^

Error: Cannot find module 'C:\Program Files\nodejs\node_modules\@railway\cli\bin\railway.js' at Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:946:15) at Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:787:27) at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:77:12) at node:internal/main/run_main_module:17:47 { code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND', requireStack: [] } `

Could you please check it? Or direct me to any docs that may help resolve this.

FWIW, I have yet to see an application written with Cobra that is comprehensible. The Cobra API — while feature-rich — seems to nudge code in a bad way. Cleaning that up wouldn’t necessitate a rewrite, let alone to another language.

It's nice to see Railway on here. Easy to get started with, generous free tier for low usage, pay as you go. Underrated!