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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

The fun part is it is pretty easy to “rewrite” ripgrep in rust, because burntsushi wrote it as a ton of crates which you can reuse. So you can reuse this to build your own with blackjack and hookers.

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A "ton of crates" is IMO the best way to write large Rust programs. Each crate in Rust is a compilation unit, the equivalent of one `.c` file in C. If they don't depend on one another, each crate can be compiled in parallel. It makes building the whole project faster, often significantly so. As with anything one can take it too far, but as long as each crate makes sense as an independent unit it's good.

Isn't creating a bunch of crates pretty annoying, logistically (in terms of mandatory directory structure and metadata files per crate)? (Compared with C/C++ individual .c/.cpp files being compilation units.) And does parallel compilation of crates break LTO?

Not particularly annoying. You type `cargo new [options] <path>`, probably with the `--lib` option for a library crate, and it makes a new crate at <path>. Then you open the created lib.rs & cargo.toml in your editor & start writing code.

You end up with at least one extra level of directory nesting, and you have to manage a Cargo.toml for each crate?

Gotta add a +1 for this. I wanted to do some ignore files etc for a project.

I thought "well I kinda want to do what rg does". Had a little glance and it was already nicely extracted into a separate crate that was a dream to use.

Thanks @BurntSushi!

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