cargo supports all of the things you talked about, though. Cross-compiles are part of the fundamental model of cargo (target vs host dependencies). cargo can

cargo supports all of the things you talked about, though. Cross-compiles are part of the fundamental model of cargo (target vs host dependencies). cargo can be used in a completely offline manner easily, through either caching dependencies in an online step or vendoring them (or just not using dependencies). Cargo has pretty good support for dependency patching. The compiler can be swapped out through an environment variable, RUSTC_WRAPPER. I agree that all of those things are valuable! The cargo developers think so too which is why cargo supports all of them. I suspect the future is more in making tools like cargo support all the use cases people are concerned about, than trying to find an orthogonality where one doesn't exist.