Cargo is what a package manager should be_

Clippy is a linter with hundreds of rules, most of them genuinely useful. It catches performance issues, idiomatic Rust violations, and subtle logic bugs. Run it in CI with -D warnings (deny all warnings) and your codebase stays clean by default.

Three commands and you have a new project, a build, and a passing test run. No CMakeLists.txt, no find_package incantations, no separate test runner. The Cargo.toml format is readable TOML and the lockfile is deterministic. This should not be impressive but it is.

Cargo workspaces let you manage multiple related crates in one repository with a single Cargo.lock. Shared dependencies are deduplicated. This is the right way to structure a multi-crate project and it works out of the box.

The Rust ecosystem is younger than npm or PyPI but the quality bar is higher on average. The combination of a good type system, clippy, and a culture of writing documentation (docs.rs generates docs from every crate automatically) means most crates are easy to evaluate and use.