6. What are you talking about, it’s always better.

But seriously, I don’t have much Rust proficiency and I still pick software in Rust because 1. installing and updating rust itself and things installed with it is a bliss; and 2. the CLI experience of Rust programs tends to be much better than alternatives.

Contrasting that with installing something with Go, which is a common alternative for things written in Rust:

• First, I need Go. So if I chose to install it via another package manager - perhaps with the exception of pacman - I may end up with an out of date version that may cause issues when compiling newer code. I had this happen a few times.
• If I chose to build it myself, first I need an older version of Go to compile a newer Go. Very fun.
• If I chose to install it via their website, it’s a manual .tar.gz download and extraction of an executable that doesn’t self-update, so next time I not only have to repeat this, but I need to remember it.
• Then there’s the gvm project, which promises to resolve some of this friction, and it was my method of choice, but I’m not sure it’s maintained anymore and I always have to look up their commands because of things like: gvm list works, but to list versions for download it’s gvm listall instead of gvm list --all)

Now for Rust:

• curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
• optional cargo install cargo-update to update everything else with cargo install-update -a

As someone learning Rust, I’ll say that I appreciate the “advice” at the top because cloning is often tempting to use but - even though that’s usually okay - it doesn’t help one to practice the rust-specific ways of handling scope, ownership, and borrowing.

top 5 best things I’ve done in the last year