Building CLI Tools with Rust

A talk about why Rust is excellent for command-line applications.

Event

RustConf 2024 - June 15, 2024

Abstract

Rust's combination of performance, safety, and excellent tooling makes it ideal for building CLI applications. In this talk, we'll explore the ecosystem and build a practical tool from scratch.

Topics Covered

1. Why Rust for CLI tools?
2. Essential crates: clap, anyhow, thiserror
3. Structured output with serde
4. Testing CLI applications
5. Distribution and cross-compilation

Key Takeaways

• Rust's type system catches errors at compile time
• clap provides powerful argument parsing with derive macros
• Cross-compilation enables easy multi-platform releases
• Cargo makes dependency management painless

Resources

• Slides
• Example Code
• Video Recording

Related Projects

This talk led to the creation of bim, a static site generator built with the techniques discussed.

Related: #rust #cli #talks @conference