Rust Cargo is a lot like Python Poetry 😍 | A Pythonista Learning Rust

When you start working in Rust, you'll quickly learn about Cargo and love it!

It's a package manager and build system that helps you manage your Rust projects.

Coming from Python, I found it very similar to Poetry, which is a great tool as well).

Features

Dependency management: Cargo.toml
Virtual environments: Cargo.toml and Cargo.lock
Lock files: Cargo.lock
Build system: cargo build, cargo run, cargo test, cargo doc
Publishing to crates.io: cargo publish

Cargo vs Poetry Commands Cheat Sheet

Here's a quick comparison of some common commands in Cargo and Poetry. Notice how similar they are! 😎

Action	Cargo Command	Poetry Command
Initialize a project	`cargo new project_name`	`poetry new project_name`
Initialize in current dir	`cargo init`	`poetry init`
Add a dependency	`cargo add dependency_name`	`poetry add dependency_name`
Remove a dependency	`cargo remove dependency_name`	`poetry remove dependency_name`
Update dependencies	`cargo update`	`poetry update`
List dependencies	`cargo tree`	`poetry show --tree`
Build the project	`cargo build`	`poetry build`
Run the project	`cargo run`	`poetry run python your_script.py`
Run tests	`cargo test`	`poetry run pytest` (requires pytest)
Generate documentation	`cargo doc`	Not built-in, use a tool liked Sphinx
Build release binary	`cargo build --release`	`poetry build` (for packaging)
Run release binary	`cargo run --release`	Not directly supported
Format code	`cargo fmt`	`poetry run black .` (requires black)
Lint code	`cargo clippy`	`poetry run flake8 .` (requires flake8)

One cool thing I noticed is that generating docs and testing is built-in in Cargo, while in Python you need to use external tools like Sphinx and pytest.

Conclusion

If you love Poetry, you'll love Cargo too! They are both great tools for managing your projects and dependencies.

Funny enough, in Python I actually stopped using poetry in favor of venv and pip because I felt this was faster and all I needed. But in Rust so far I feel Cargo is more integrated and I am using it more (well, don't have much choice, have I? 😅).

I think it's mainly because I don't have to deal with virtual environments in Rust, which is a big plus. Also it infers the binary name from the project name, which is nice. 📈

This post was just to quickly compare Cargo and Poetry and show you how similar they are. I hope you found it helpful! 😊

I am sure I will do more in-depth posts on Cargo in the future. Stay tuned! 🚀