I think this specifically is overstated. There's a lot of folks successfully using Rust without cargo. It's some extra work, but it's typically easier than packaging stuff for nixpkgs. The rust/cargo folks have done a good job of making this friendly to automation.

Notably, it is much easier to port 99.9% of Rust crates to a new build system than to do the same for your average C/C++ project.

In reply to @tumble1999:matrix.org
i could do that if there were other projects that do the same thing perhaps

curl -v https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/aho-corasick/1.1.4/download -L -A "python-requests/2.33.1"
< HTTP/2 403
...
{"errors":[{"detail":"We are unable to process your request at this time. This usually means that you are in violation of our API data access policy (https://crates.io/data-access). Please email help@crates.io and provide the request id ..."}]}

In reply to @9hp71n:matrix.org
There might be a new problem with fetchCargoVendor - crates.io started blocking current python requests user-agent python-requests/2.33.1 that is used in fetch-cargo-vendor-util.py (because it does not set one explicitly in script):

curl -v https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/aho-corasick/1.1.4/download -L -A "python-requests/2.33.1"
< HTTP/2 403
...
{"errors":[{"detail":"We are unable to process your request at this time. This usually means that you are in violation of our API data access policy (https://crates.io/data-access). Please email help@crates.io and provide the request id ..."}]}

(some context https://matrix.to/#/!6oudZq5zJjAyrxL2uY:0upti.me/$Q25UIZLIjieJpO52C6VkOPoUYRBqtuEEN2QI4uUBIrM?via=nixos.org&via=matrix.org&via=node.marinchik.ink)