This is in fact one part of the post that was based on an unironic kernel of truth. I've wrestled with this more than most people. In particular I tried to fit cargo into the Fuchsia build system, with only partial success. That approach has been abandoned and Fuchsia now translates Cargo manifests into GN build rules, which seems to be the prevailing approach for polyglot builds, especially with Bazel.

However, the experience when doing pure Rust is night and day compared with stuff like CMake. And even in a polyglot build, the Cargo manifest is a reasonably good starting point, as argued recently by matklad[1].

Obviously, build systems and package managers at large scale are very challenging to get right, otherwise we'd have a good solution by now. I personally think Bazel is a pretty good step in the right direction, but it's very clunky and awkward for smaller projects. I found Neil Mitchell's classification[2] useful. Cargo is best-in-class for the "small" and arguably "medium" cases, but starts showing its limitations beyond that. Bazel is the reverse, one of the few really workable choices for "huge" but not a great experience otherwise.

[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-lang...

[2]: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-buil...