Rust is a rather young language that has been designed from scratch to be a practical and useful tool for programmers. This is a great situation to be in: there are no legacy applications to care about, and many lessons learned from other languages have been incorporated in Rust—especially around tooling.
Integrating and managing third-party packages has been an issue in the past for a lot of languages, and there are a few different approaches out there:
- NPM: The package manager for Node, which has been very popular with the JavaScript community
- Maven: Enterprise-grade Java package management, based on the XML format
- NuGet: .NET's package management
- PyPI: The Python package index
Each of these has different styles of configuration, naming guidelines, publishing infrastructure, features, plugins, and so on. The Rust team learned from all of these...
