Post by @Ferk@lemmy.ml

2026-10-26 19:38 UTC

As I said, that’s a minority. Because there is no infrastructure supporting this. Why would anyone write Rustc only programs, if there is no such package and widespread availability? But there is. Whenever there’s need for “freestanding” (which has a specific meaning) or rust being on the side (ie. like Linux kernel), people have no problems to use rustc. It being bundled with cargo does not stop rust devs from using rustc. I find it hard to believe that you legitimately do think that the one thing stopping people from using rustc for these usecases is that cargo is simply available simultaneously with rustc. Did you know that there’s no g++ package in archlinux either? it’s bundled in the gcc package… do you think that means that there’s no widespread availability of g++ in Archlinux? Debian does have a rustc package, is using rustc directly more widespread in Debian?

Replies (1)

@thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2026-10-26 19:51

I’m not saying it stops people from using rustc only. I think there is a huge misunderstanding here. Currently, its just highly specialized use cases where they have to use rustc only without even the standard library (I think the Linux Kernel doesn’t use the stdlib). What I say is, that the current infrastructure and distributions doesn’t treat rustc+stdlib as its own thing, that nobody will target it and everyone assumes Cargo. In example there is no rustc+stdlib compiler as a package by distributions. This should be a standard package by all distributions in my opinion, just like we have C compilers doing the most basic thing. From packaging standpoint. This would encourage people to do such projects, as if you just require basic tools that are not always installed, but can be assumed to easily install. It also should have less dependencies than Cargo and rustfmt in example, or even rustup. I think the g++ comparison doesn’t hold here, because it’s not the only way of using the language. Rust on the other hand has only one other way of doing this, it’s the dependency heavy and full package with cargo and the rest, even usually downloading dependencies and and so on. It’s a full package manager. If g++ was the only alternative to such a system, I think it would have more widespread adoption. Debian does have a rustc package, is using rustc directly more widespread in Debian? Well it needs to be a standard in most common distributions. No one wants to rely on something that is found in one distribution only.

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