> I am very skeptical about this. Every language which needs a "package manager" tends to make building standalone applications painful.

Rust does not need a package manager. We've used it for a long time without one. If the package-manager-free workflow with manual installation (or through an IDE, etc.) is to your liking, use it!

> However, C++ is a platform agnostic language, while Rust thus far has only supported Linux as a first class platform.

Totally false. I'm the earliest developer still full-time on the Rust language (4+ years) and I was exclusively using Mac OS X from the beginning. If you look at Servo, Mac is actually better supported than Linux at the moment.

Graydon was adamant that Windows must be supported from the start, and we have not changed that.

> I find the attitude of the Rust devs ("we will improve Windows support once the language is stable") deeply misguided. It meant that they largely missed out on feedback from Windows developers during the development of the language.

What feedback is that? Most of the language-level concerns are platform-independent, except for COM, etc (which we are familiar with).

Furthermore, we have Windows support, and it's not that far behind the other platforms. Later on in your comments, you talk about a binary installer. That's not something we have on any platform yet.

> And the Rust developers seem to continue to go down that rabbit hole by enlisting Ruby developers to develop a "package manager". As a Windows guy the very word makes me cringe. How is that thing going to integrate with Visual Studio and other Windows specific concerns?

You don't need to use it if you're using Visual Studio. If you like your tools, keep them! That's Rust's attitude.

> I do not trust any Ruby developer to write portable software, they are married to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. Would you expect Microsoft guys to develop something which actually works well on Linux?

Of course I would, if they were competent developers.

> Also remember that C++ does not have a "package manager". Some of the most complex and massive applications in the world are written in C++, yet you do not hear many C++ developers crying "When will we finally get a package manager?". It is not even on the agenda. C does not have one either.

There are tons of popular C++ package managers: Homebrew and apt-get, to name a couple.

> A package manager may belong to a Linux development environment for Rust, but the language itself and its library handling should be completely independent of it.

That is precisely what Rust does.

> Rust libraries should work just like C++ libraries so that they do integrate well with other development environments.

That is also precisely what Rust does.

> I see Rust becoming a new OCaml, utterly Linux-centric and thus leaving C++ as the sole competitor in the maximal performance + high-level abstractions + platform agnostic category.

This is really silly and hyperbolic, and somewhat insulting to those of us who have spent a lot of time making sure the design works well on Windows. Like I said, I've been working full-time on this project longer than anyone else and I exclusively use a Mac.

Mozilla is not going to invest in a language that won't work on Windows, for obvious reasons. We have a lot of Windows developers here too, you know.

First-class support for Windows is evident everywhere in the design, from the use of libuv instead of libevent for the green threading to the lack of exposure of `select` or `fork` due to that not performing well on Windows.

> For the sake of games no longer crashing randomly because of memory corruption bugs: change course now.

To what? Abandoning the package manager? That'd be alienating a large segment of users who want a tool to create and share libraries, and deploy binaries onto servers for the sake of unhappy Windows developers who dislike that workflow. Instead I think we should do what we're doing now: invest in the package manager, but allow the tools and libraries to be totally independent of it, so that you can use Visual Studio or whatever you'd like with Rust.