Rust2018 and the Great CLI Awakening
From Rust2018 and the Great CLI Awakening by Vitiral:
spoiler: simultaniously[sic] refreshing and painful
Rust is a fantastic language for writing a Command Line Application (CLI). For the ergonomics of hacking, it has one of the best argument parsers ever, has seriously the best serialization library ever and it compiles to almost any target and goes fast when it runs.
I had a very similar experience rewriting tcc in Rust. The first iteration was written in JavaScript, and was essentially just a wrapper around the Node title-case package using oclif. In my defence, it took (no exaggeration) fifteen minutes to make, however running it felt like it took fifteen minutes to complete (slight exaggeration). I’ve been intrigued by Rust since I first heard about it a few years ago, and have been following its development at a distance. I’ve never felt that I had a good excuse to try it though, until I finally got fed up with tcc 1.0’s performance and took the plunge. I recently saw a fantastic list of excellent resources for learning Rust, and can’t wait to find out all of the anti-patterns I stumbled into in the development of tcc's second iteration.