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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

Cargo and crates.io is easily as simple as npm for installation and distribution. I find it to be more reliable than npm in general. Generally it’s very easy to write system agnostic software in Rust, as most of the foundational libraries abstract that away.

So when you say “compiled app” you might be referring instead to C or C++ apps, which don’t generally have as simple and common a distribution model. Rust is entirely different, and incorporated a lot of design decisions about how to package software from npm and other languages.

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Cargo is still a dev tool and isn't a great distribution solution.

I disagree. Cargo is a great distribution tool, for Rust projects. I just tell people, first install rust, then just `cargo install`

Second, this was in response to an npm is simpler comment; npm and cargo are absolutely the same category of tool.

I actually recommend cargo install cargo-binstall first, then cargo install <crate>. This is because it is quite annoying to compile packages every time you want to install something new whereas binstall distributes binaries instead, much faster.

Feels like we need a single command for that, I have two goals for my workflow (like maybe bininstall should be included in Cargo):

1) what’s the easiest way to give people access to a tool I just wrote, `cargo publish`

2) what’s the easiest way for someone to use it, as few steps as possible, right now it’s `install rust` && `cargo install`.

Once I get to three or more steps on 2 I tend to turn to just or make depending on the context.

You should combine step 1 and 2 in CI. Just tag a version in your git, push to remote and have CI auto build a release for you.

Use github actions or other setup for other backends.

(this is language agnostic and a reasonable thing to learn as a dev).

Or if you must live in the cargo command, go nuts with cargo-release.

https://github.com/crate-ci/cargo-release

https://github.com/cargo-bins/release-pr

> I just tell people, first install rust, then just `cargo install`

local compilation may work for you and other individuals, but "just cargo install" can immediately run into issues if you're trying to deploy something to things that aren't dev workstations

> npm and cargo are absolutely the same category of tool

as a dev tool? absolutely. as a production distribution solution? definitely not

The overlap between people who want to run something like ESLint and people with dev workstations is very close to 100%.

There's a significant difference between a machine that compiles rust quickly and a machine that can execute JS.

You just need to compile it once in a while. It's slow, yes, but really not that big of a deal.

> as a production distribution solution? definitely not

If you’re talking about distributing Rust projects, sure it’s fine. Generally though, if you’re orchestrating a bunch of other things outside the rust software itself, I’d turn to just.

npm is still mainly used in JavaScript and Typescript scenarios, so I think you’re kinda splitting hairs if you’re suggesting it’s a general purpose tool.

there's a reason `cargo install` is usually the last distribution option that maintainers of rust software provide ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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