Don’t forget cmake. (It makes adding dependencies easy, and everything else basically impossible)

Sure, despite all the hate it gets, except for IDE project files, it is the best experience in C and C++ build tools since forever, including IDE integration just like those project files.

I thought the whole UNIX mentality was worse is better.

No build tool is without issues, my pain points with cargo, are always compiling from source, build caching requires additional work to setup, as soon as it is more than pure Rust, we get a build.rs file that can get quite creative.

And from Internals discussion (https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/add-some-form-of-precompil...) it seems this causes more problems than it solves.

It requires huge storage, for each combination of targets, and even if it is was solved some members of Rust community would see it as a step back.

Me included. They are hard to audit and are step back to OSS nature of Rust.

A systems programming language is supposed to support all deployment scenarios, not to be religious.

Wdym? The language supports it, how else could have serde done it?

The issue here is getting storage and compute for build artifacs for cargo. Cargo isn't the language though.

I also don't understand the CMake hate. Modern CMake (3.14+) is just around 10 lines to build basic sources/libraries/executables. And you can either use CMake FetchContent or use CPM https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake to fetch dependencies. No third-party tool like vcpkg or conan is needed.

I think CMake is the perfect balance. You need to write few lines and think about few things before adding a dependency, but usually nothing too crazy. It might not work the first try but that's okay.