Cargo VS neovim

cargo, rustfmt, clippy, rust-analyzer, and Rust’s robust unit testing capabilities together form a powerful ecosystem for managing large-scale projects like Spin.

That work is being tracked in https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/5931

Someone has taken up the work on this though there are some foundational steps first.

1. We need to delineate intermediate and final build artifacts so people have a clearer understanding in `target/` what has stability guarantees (implemented, awaiting stabilization).

2. We then need to re-organize the target directory from being organized by file type to being organized by crate instance.

3. We need to re-do the file locking for `target/` so when we share things, one cargo process won't lock out your entire system

4. We can then start exploring moving intermediate artifacts into a central location.

There are some caveats to this initial implementation

- To avoid cache poisoning, this will only items with immutable source that and an idempotent build, leaving out your local source and stuff that depends on build scripts and proc-macros. There is work to reduce the reliance on build scripts and proc-macros. We may also need a "trust me, this is idempotent" flag for some remaining cases.

- A new instance of a crate will be created in the cache if any dependency changes versions, reducing reuse. This becomes worse when foundation crates release frequently and when adding or updating a specific dependency, Cargo prefers to keep all existing versions, creating a very unpredictable dependency tree. Support for remote caches, especially if you can use your project's CI as a cache source, would help a lot with this.

> It seems wild to consider such intermediate files as part of public API. Someone relying on it does not automatically make it a breaking change if it’s not documented.

To find what is considered an intermediate vs a final artifact from cargo, you need to check out https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-cache.html

We are working on making this clearer with https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/14125 where there will be `build.build-dir` (intermediate files) and `build.target-dir` (final artifacts).

When you do a `cargo build` inside of a library, like `clap`, you will get an rlip copied into `build.target-dir` (final artifacts). This is intended for integration with other build systems. There are holes with this workflow though but identifying all of the relevant cases for what might be a "safe" breakage is difficult.

See https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/13897 and https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/13897#issuecomment... .

Powerful tooling: Cargo simplifies dependency management, builds, and testing.

What I mean is that in open source, things only get done by people motivated to do them. Nobody has ever even asked for darcs support: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20sta...

So the lack of darcs isn’t because the Cargo folks think it’s bad or something. Just that things don’t get added just because.

Re quirks, sure, that’s why rustc and cargo are different. You don’t have to use Cargo. Meta does not, the Linux kernel does not.

One of the reasons why user PRs are so frequent is that Rust itself is a pretty straightforward language to contribute to. While the language itself is on the complex side (to say the least), its strict compiler and single package manager make it relatively manageable to run and test any changes and to be confident that what you've submitted will work as expected.

> That’s because, while cargo is great at building things, it is very simplistic at installing them. Cargo wants everything in a few neat binaries, and that isn’t our use case. Fish has about 1200 .fish scripts (961 completions, 217 associated functions), as well as about 130 pages of documentation (as html and man pages), and the web-config tool and the man page generator (both written in python).

Our issue for this is https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2729

Personally, I lean away from Cargo expanding into these use cases and prefer another tool being implemented on top. I've written more about this at https://epage.github.io/blog/2023/08/are-we-gui-build-yet/

Is an explicit, safe and less error prone way of doing it.

...and one that doesn't walk us down the road of (see the linked thread) the obvious desire people are going to have sooner or later to cache binary builds instead of building locally, and turn `cargo install` into some kind of binary application distribution application or app store.

If you don't believe me, read that thread, and the linked thread.

[1] - https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/13994#issuecomment...

Vim is a highly efficient, keyboard-driven text editor that prioritizes speed, precision, and control. It’s been around for decades, but it’s far from outdated. In recent years, Vim has seen a resurgence, thanks largely to Neovim, a modern refactor of Vim that brings a faster core, better plugin support, and a vibrant, forward-looking community.

A text-based shell interface is extremely lightweight compared to modern IDEs. Because it runs in the terminal, even a feature-rich agent has very low overhead. According to Forgecode “Low Resource Usage: minimal impact on system performance”. In contrast, a full IDE can consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM or more, even when idle. In one user benchmark, Neovim (a terminal editor) used only about 10 MB of RAM, whereas Visual Studio Code (an Electron-based IDE) used roughly 700 MB with no files open. The savings add up quickly: even a hundred developers using shell agents could free up many gigabytes of memory compared to the same number running heavy IDE instances. In practice, a shell agent like Forge leaves almost all CPU and RAM free for your code compilation and tests. In a cloud or CI/CD pipeline, this efficiency translates directly into cost savings. You can run more parallel analyses or smaller instances when the tools are light. Over time, those saved resources mean lower infrastructure bills for large teams.

So I headed over to the Neovim GitHub like any lost soul would and followed the official install steps:

Neovim GitHub Repository

PDE (Personalized Development Environment): Neovim

I've used VSCode for years. It's great, no doubt. But when you have to juggle up to 5 projects daily, you'll find that it's going to block you away. Mine feels heavy, especially with multiple windows and extensions. This is why I decided to find an alternative, until I started using NeoVim instead.

As the developer of the Automad flat-file content management system, I wanted to make working with Automad themes in Neovim as smooth as possible. Automad has its own templating syntax, so I created tree-sitter-automad to provide proper syntax highlighting. Since it’s not yet an official parser, you need to manually register it in Neovim. To speed up template writing, you can also add custom snippets using LuaSnip. Here's how to set everything up.