Rust is so popular these days that "written in Rust" is undoubtedly going to become a meme (if it hasn't already). It's time I give it a try!

The appeal of Rust

I can understand the appeal of Rust. It's a modern language (meaning it doesn't have a ton of legacy cruft), it has a unique memory model that prevents certain classes of bugs, yet it still has manual memory management. This is a unique combination.

Theoretically, this should allow Rust to be used all the way from memory-constrained embedded systems to high level apps.

What about C++?

Now, I'm not willing to jump to a new language and ecosystem just because it's shiny and new. Rust's memory model seems like an improvement over C++, but modern C++ has (in my experience) fewer memory bugs anyway, thanks to smart pointers and the RAII pattern.

But here are some other enticing features of Rust:

• Rust has its own package manager, Cargo
• Rust has its own build system, which is also Cargo
• Rust's compiler is built on LLVM, so it can trivially target WebAssembly

If I had to pick the worst part of C++ development, I'd say it's setting up a build system and dealing with dependencies. To me, Cargo is actually the biggest differentiator for Rust as compared to C++.

Installing Rust

It might be unreasonable, but I'd like my programming language of choice to have a development environment that is compact and simple to setup. Aside: this is one of the reasons I enjoy Deno: it ships as a single (fairly small) binary.

Following Rust's getting started instructions, I'm immediately discouraged:

It looks like you’re running Windows. To start using Rust, download the installer, then run the program and follow the onscreen instructions. You may need to install the Visual Studio C++ Build tools when prompted to do so.

I have to install a full C++ development environment just to use Rust? Ok, well I click the link and download ~35 MB. Not too bad until it becomes apparent that the download is just the installer itself. I'm then presented with a huge list of options for things to install.

The Rust installer indicates that I should install the Windows 10 SDK, so I select that and am horrified to see that it is 2.8 GB.

Recap

Based on the documentation I've seen so far, it looks like you have to install nearly 3 GB of C++ tools just to get a working Rust development environment on Windows.

At this point, I'm speechless. I was willing to tolerate a ~500 MB download for a new programming language, but I'm already up to about six times that size without even getting to the Rust part.

A quick web search indicates that this requirement is just to provide things like a linker, but I'm certain these tools are much less than 3 GB in size.

I was also under the impression that Rust was fully open source, so requiring closed source tools to build on Windows seems bizarre (note: MinGW might fill in this gap, but that's another huge download I'd like to avoid, if possible).

Setting this aside for now...

That's enough disappointment for one day. I'd still like to give Rust a go, but it looks like first I'm going to have to figure out how to get a working environment without installing gigabytes of unrelated tooling (especially since part of my motivation to try Rust was to avoid having to setup an entire C++ toolchain!).