Tbh I would much rather write utilities in Go. The advantages of Rust are minimal here and the disadvantages are an obstacle. Last time I wrote a CLI in Rust it was a search index builder you could pipe CSV to. Awful DX. Go is almost too easy for that kind of thing.

Yeah, you don't need/want manual memory management for most CLIs.

If anything I’ve actually seen people using the OS’s virtual memory as a garbage collector in C and C++. Not really portable everywhere, but close enough for most people. For short-lived executables that can’t really allocate unlimited memory, it’s perfectly fine.

I've done that. But in those cases, GC would also be fine. Might even end before it collects.

oh fer sure