I don't think it says much about the tools themselves though, it just makes sense when you look at the author's GitHub and see a bunch of Rust projects.

I think there are a couple of relevant factors

- Can be distributed as a single binary, not requiring an interpreter and virtual environment. - Being more fun to make a hobby tool in due to minimal footguns compared to C/C++. - Really good dependency management and build tool making it easy to compose these CLIs out of powerful building blocks (at east for Rust). For example, ripgrep is broken up into a lot of packages that you can compose together to make your own custom tool.

CLI tools have pretty strong needs to be self contained exes that start up fast. That rules out a lot of the more popular languages.

unless I'm missing something, jq isn't[1]

[1] https://github.com/stedolan/jq/tree/master/src

Yeah that's an error

The reason for that is more the user than the tools themselves in my opinion.

I found this too. I also found the only one I use is written in C - tig.