Cargo

Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 27 threads.

People raised many different problems with Cargo, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 27 complaints

Cargo's caching is horrible when used in a monorepo2026-01-28
Large projects become unusable on NFS because Cargo does heavy file and random IO2025-12-27
Completely opaque and mixes too many different functions together2025-11-13
Opaque tool that mixes many functions, making distribution a headache for downstream users2025-11-13
Rebuild silently pulls newer packages from the internet, breaking a previously working build2025-10-24
Multiple versions of the same crate get pulled into builds without any warning2025-08-16
Commenter finds the Cargo build tool annoying to use, without specifying why2025-05-14
Non-default folder layouts are confusing for outsiders discovering the codebase2024-07-14
Packagers must apply hacks to stop Cargo fetching dependencies online; feature flags explode package variants2024-04-03
Vendoring dependencies in Cargo, especially with workspaces, runs into many painful problems2024-03-26
Being asked to choose options (git repo, name, git settings) before having a reason to care2024-02-18
Cross compilation with Cargo is bad, so they needed another toolchain2023-09-13
Cargo and rust-analyzer fight over a lock, forcing the user into hacky workarounds2023-01-19
Cargo fails basic cross compilation cases and forces its build tooling on users, making work harder2022-11-02
Dependencies introduce hidden breakage the user can't see or predict2022-09-21
Hard to re-enable needed features after disabling defaults; took a day to configure2022-09-17
Requires frustrating boilerplate workarounds to make basic things work2022-08-03
Must look up latest crate version in browser and copy it into Cargo.toml manually2022-06-30
Confusing crate vs package terms and too many steps, requiring repeated tutorial lookups2022-01-25
Higher learning curve, and developers hit confusing syntax like HOLDS and cargo_attach that are easy to forget2022-01-08
Build fails with a bare 'could not compile' message giving no hint of the cause2021-12-31
Tooling doesn't work offline or without crates.io, forcing a single centralized repository2021-11-18
Can't exclude default features; deep dependencies re-enable them regardless2021-09-05
Tooling complexity and opacity make a simple install hard to get working2021-04-21
Every step outside Cargo's supported area becomes a fiddly pain point2020-10-12
Other build systems are very hard to use compared to cargo2017-11-15
Dependencies get recompiled per project with no shared cache, which confused a new user2017-05-16