Pypi isn’t in any way less an option for distributing software countless projects that use it that way can be used as a proof. Hell, awscli installed from pypi for ages. In my experience cargo is extremely slow at downloading hundred libraries that every program needs and rustc is extremely slowly builds them.
Correction, uv isn’t in any way less an option. pypi is only the registry. If you are using pip you will end up in dependency hell, you might use something like poetry to avoid that, but uv is just better.
But… wait a minute… uv is inspired by cargo, and it’s also written in rust. That’s quite the coincidence, huh?
Also, cargo is fast, it’s rustc that’s slow, and that’s because rustc is doing advanced code analysis. Compiling rust is actually NP-hard, but in exchange for that, the compiler will catch bugs in place of the developer. Which is a good tradeoff considering that you only compile once and run many times.
“countless projects that use it that way” isn’t proof of anything. Countless projects tell you to curl a 2000 lines script into sudo bash that will fill your os with bullshit.
Pip is a sane default that works for absolute majority of cases, anyway correct tool for installing programs from pypi is pipx that eliminates ‘dependency hell’, but ofc new cool tool is the only way to do things.
When little program in rust that replaced previous one compiles two hours compared to previous that compiled in a few minutes it matters.
UV is a lot more than pipx. It installs applications from pypi, without dependency hell, but it also uses hard links when possible to avoid wasting space. But it’s also a dev tool. It manages python installations, workspaces, you can use it to edit the pyproject, it can also publish to pypi, even from a GitHub action if set up from pypi. It just does a lot more.
None of the issues you’ve described are Cargo’s fault. The long compilation time is simply rustc’s compile-time checks (ensuring type and memory safety is much more involved than lexing in GCC), and the number of dependencies to compile is a result of the crate ecosystem. Cargo is just the front-end that automates fetching dependencies and compilation with rustc. Blaming it for slow compilation is like hitting your monitor when the computer is acting up.
I’m not blaming cargo specifically for building it is slow to download deps as well, which was clearly stated in my first post. I’m going to edit it now.
The Rust compiler is more sophisticated than most compilers, so it can be slower at the same kind of tasks. But it also just does a different task here.
One of the tradeoffs in Rust’s design is that libraries get compiled specifically for a concrete application. So, whereas in most programming languages, you just download pre-compiled libraries, in Rust, you actually download their source code and compile all of it on your machine.
This isn’t relevant, if you get a pre-built binary. And it’s not particularly relevant during development either, because you get incremental compilation. But yeah, if someone wants to compile a Rust codebase from scratch, then they have to sit through a long build.
Pypi isn’t in any way less an option for distributing software countless projects that use it that way can be used as a proof. Hell, awscli installed from pypi for ages. In my experience cargo is extremely slow at downloading hundred libraries that every program needs and rustc is extremely slowly builds them.
Correction, uv isn’t in any way less an option. pypi is only the registry. If you are using pip you will end up in dependency hell, you might use something like poetry to avoid that, but uv is just better.
But… wait a minute… uv is inspired by cargo, and it’s also written in rust. That’s quite the coincidence, huh?
Also, cargo is fast, it’s rustc that’s slow, and that’s because rustc is doing advanced code analysis. Compiling rust is actually NP-hard, but in exchange for that, the compiler will catch bugs in place of the developer. Which is a good tradeoff considering that you only compile once and run many times.
“countless projects that use it that way” isn’t proof of anything. Countless projects tell you to
curla 2000 lines script intosudo bashthat will fill your os with bullshit.Pip is a sane default that works for absolute majority of cases, anyway correct tool for installing programs from pypi is pipx that eliminates ‘dependency hell’, but ofc new cool tool is the only way to do things.
When little program in rust that replaced previous one compiles two hours compared to previous that compiled in a few minutes it matters.
UV is a lot more than pipx. It installs applications from pypi, without dependency hell, but it also uses hard links when possible to avoid wasting space. But it’s also a dev tool. It manages python installations, workspaces, you can use it to edit the pyproject, it can also publish to pypi, even from a GitHub action if set up from pypi. It just does a lot more.
None of the issues you’ve described are Cargo’s fault. The long compilation time is simply rustc’s compile-time checks (ensuring type and memory safety is much more involved than lexing in GCC), and the number of dependencies to compile is a result of the crate ecosystem. Cargo is just the front-end that automates fetching dependencies and compilation with rustc. Blaming it for slow compilation is like hitting your monitor when the computer is acting up.
I’m not blaming cargo specifically for building it is slow to download deps as well, which was clearly stated in my first post. I’m going to edit it now.
The Rust compiler is more sophisticated than most compilers, so it can be slower at the same kind of tasks. But it also just does a different task here.
One of the tradeoffs in Rust’s design is that libraries get compiled specifically for a concrete application. So, whereas in most programming languages, you just download pre-compiled libraries, in Rust, you actually download their source code and compile all of it on your machine.
This isn’t relevant, if you get a pre-built binary. And it’s not particularly relevant during development either, because you get incremental compilation. But yeah, if someone wants to compile a Rust codebase from scratch, then they have to sit through a long build.