Rust ergonomics 101: fast and easy access to the tools

The Problem

One of the pain points often mentioned around rust is the long compilation times. While this is certainly an issue I would like addressed, it is often over-hyped in my opinion when talking about developing in rust.

However, when trying to download applications distributed in rust, the compile times become a huge pain since the standard as of today seems to be to distribute applications via cargo. cargo install <crate> requires the full download and compilation of all crate dependencies, which can easily take more than half an hour for several applications.

This is unnacceptable in my opinion, and it really harms rust as a language that tools like rustfix, cargo-edit, etc have to be installed through cargo. When I want to create a fake virtual env I require all my contributors to have these in their local path – but setting up all these tools takes upwards of 40 minutes on my laptop (!).

One possible solution: 0install

The solution is simple: rust allows extremly easy cross compilation and deployment of binaries through the amazing template trust which uses cross. In the future I would like to make a script for setting up this template, but for now it works quite well and many rust projects use it.

However, distributing a binary is not enough – there needs to be an easy way to install it for any platform – whether that be included in a build script, a “virtual environment”, or a user’s desktop. I thought about going out and creating such a tool and then I came accross 0install.

0install relies on only a webpage for knowing how to install software. The webpage simply needs to include the xml data of the binaries and dependencies – and that’s it.

I like the design philosophy of 0install, but I had an impossible time actually installing it on my arch linux system. There is an open bug about this. In addition, I opened another one requesting a pre-compiled binary. Since 0install is written in OCaml, I don’t know how likely this is to be fulfilled.

Another Solution: where rust can shine

Distributing an easy to install binary is an area where rust can really shine. I already distribute artifact as a pre-compiled binary and it is works really well.

So this blog post might be the lanch of my next project: a simple binary package manager written in rust. The requirements are similar to 0install but I am trying to make it even simpler. I call the tool wpkg (“web package”, like wget but for package installation). I’ve started the initial design approach and would love to know who is interested and if anyone might want to join the effort.

https://github.com/vitiral/wpkg

If you have an opinion (either positive or negative) please open an issue and let me know!

Edit: Nix to the rescue

Although this doesn’t meet quite ALL my requirements (mainly that it still requires packaging in the Nix repo), I am very interested in the Nix package manager. This blog post details how it can be used as a virtualenv esq package manager.