stdx VS cargo-xtask

There's none that I know of, aside from stdx which was last updated 4 years ago.

⭐ stdx - The missing batteries of Rust - Brian Anderson

brson had a repository called https://github.com/brson/stdx and it's a pity it isn't maintained anymore: some of them are in disuse now (for example, instead of lazy_static prefer stdlib's Lazy, or better yet, you don't need them if you just want to initialize a mutex or something; also error-chain) and the list could use some maintenance

You suggested creating a super-library of vetted crates. It has been tried before, but it didn’t get any adoption. stdx - The missing batteries of Rust was never used much. Looking at it now, it recommends crates that have been superseded by others.

As an example of the above, if you're not aware of it already, you might find brson/stdx interesting.

Big libraries like Boost or the Python standard library tend to develop as a workaround for weak package management so, with Cargo, efforts to produce Boost-like compilations (Eg. stdx) withered on the vine for lack of sufficient interest.

It's been suggested and people even tried doing that of their own volition with projects like stdx, but they withered away for lack of interest.

I second u/globulemix' attitude, searching on crates.io and then looking at Downloads and also git activity (might be misleading, as some projects are simply very stable). For a lot of tasks, you might wish to take a look at stdx

Seems abandoned, but there was https://github.com/brson/stdx

💡 Inspired by matklad/cargo-xtask and based on 🏃‍♂️ Write your Rust project scripts in task.rs from the Rust ecosystem.

Using a cargo-xtask task to generate them as a manual step (inlyne currently does this)

As someone else said just is good for that job, or you could implement an xtask helper for these things and setup a suitable development environment with that: https://github.com/matklad/cargo-xtask/

Well tools like cornucopia, prisma-rust-client, protoc-gen-tonic, they don't generate in build.rs, but instead provide either a cli to be called ahead of time, or provide a library that can be called by your own binary (which should generally follow the xtask pattern)

If I understand, this is a tool for when working on the project itself? Akin to a helper script? You could go the cargo install route as already pointed out but there is also the xtask convention.

For simple cli apps for internal use, such as cargo-xtasks, I prefer pico_args due to its fast compile times.

For developer-oriented stuff, there's tools like xshell and cargo-xtask. For operator tasks that need to run in a deployed environment, it's not usually a big lift to add CLI subcommands to your binary. It's certainly more boilerplate and inertia than doing stuff in a live REPL, though, and sometimes difficult to recommend for truly one-off situations.