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Comment by faichai | Hacker News Reader

I might not be familiar enough with the original tools, nor the Rust ecosystem, so excuse me if this is misinformed. But the trend seems to be that the Rust tooling is a lot richer than their original counterparts.

Is this accurate? And if so, is it super easy to write rich CLIs, with tabulated, coloured, interactive TUIs in Rust? Are their some common, widely used libraries driving this trend?

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Some are supersets and many are experimental subsets. It's early days, similar to when everyone wrote their own editor in TurboPascal.

Regarding TUIs, have a look at thes screenshots and example codebases for these libraries:

https://crates.io/crates/tui

https://crates.io/crates/spotify-tui

https://crates.io/crates/cursive

TUIs are in many ways more ergonomical, in particular they make experienced users more productive and they can help reduce RSI by limiting the need to move the mouse.

> Are their some common, widely used libraries driving this trend.

The rust community leadership made a strategic decision to pick 4 areas to suggest focus on. CLIs was one of them. (Scroll to “build it in rust” on https://www.rust-lang.org/)

I think this choice and many others by the rust leadership merit a case study in community technical leadership. Or at least a blog post by the author of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Nothing in Rust is super easy, it's an overengineered pile of crap and in 20 years from now people will be cursing at it daily.

If people are still cursing at your programming language 20 or 30 years later, you've done at least a decent job of things. Do you hear many people complaining about Eiffel, Dylan, or Boo lately?

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