rustup is just fine!

Photo by Borna Bevanda on Unsplash

Earlier this year I’ve posted this article linked below, showing how I’ve installed and used an entire BSD instance under UTM virtualization software to simply do rust development on my M1 based MacBook Air.

(In fact, I’ve even posted a follow-up afterwards — about doing ftp between the host and guest OSes — too, oh my…)

[embed]NetBSD VM on M1 to just do some Rust, for examplemedium.com

The thing was, as I said back then, I didn’t trust running rustup (the otherwise recommended installer for the Rust compiler and its associated Cargo suite) on my main hardware.

As there was no other way to do it in the presumed conditions, I’ve ended up with a light virtualized Unix system, for that, instead.

But I must confess now: I’d been assuming, without checking back then (what an ignorant!), that running rustup would actually need sudo rights on the device, and indeed that could, in theory, break my dearest OS setup — that I truly try to keep very clean myself…

I couldn’t be more wrong!

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I must retract everything from those articles today (although there would be nothing wrong if you’d continue using virtualization, either):

I’ve finally considered actually checking rustup from the ground… up, i.e. looking into their entire source code (being only sh and rust based, it isn’t difficult at all), and testing things on Mac as well.

No need to guess: 100% trust obtained; 100% success!

[embed]Getting started You can try Rust online in the Rust Playground without installing anything on your computer. Try Rust without…www.rust-lang.org

To explain: what I’ve found out is that, in fact, rustup doesn’t need sudo at all, and it installs the necessary binaries just fine under the user’s home on macOS, into only two (hidden, but expected) subdirectories: .rustup and .cargo, there.

All without doing anything strange: I could verify that both in the source code and at runtime.

Moreover, the tool presents highly detailed information about what the script will do when you run it (before it actually performs the installation job, of course, allowing you to cancel it early if you’d wish), and tells you how you can fully uninstall everything it sets up, just in case (that is, by simply running rustup self uninstall — but I haven’t tested this part myself, and I hope I wouldn’t ever want or need to: I really like rust much!) 🦀

Supplementary, to be completely honest with you, I must say that I’ve first tested the installation under yet another virtual machine, running macOS as well this time, to see nothing weird occurs, hehe:

(Of course, I could even try using the source code and build things all by myself, to avoid any further concerns, but I say, “come on, Rust community is already trusted by so many people now, that I could [reference-?] borrow some from them and they surely won’t mind”…)

And…

Finally, I’m now using Terminal (and vim) under my main macOS installation to do (all, although still little) Rust development, and I’m glad I’ve eventually gained all the trust I needed to allow myself to go for it.

By writing this I hope I could help others gain (or learn how to get) some, too.

Note: The NetBSD installation I’ve referred to in this post hasn’t been hurt while preparing this story. (I’ll keep it for indefinite time for further reference, as I think it’s the oldest OS from the 90s that looks like than today — ooh, university memories, it’s all coming back to me now! — and being still maintained as well!) 😎

Also note: Running Rust tools on a Mac with Apple silicon requires aarch64-apple-darwin binaries, of course, and this platform is not yet considered “first focus” by the Rust team, unfortunately. However, it is included in the “Tier 2” list, being at least “guaranteed to build”… (While aarch64-netBSD binaries are not even there!)

If only Apple would join the Rust foundation, they could push things towards “Tier 1”, faster?; or if the Rust team would do that by themselves, maybe Apple would join sooner, instead! ಠ_ಠ