So if I am on a plane at 36,000 feet, I cannot start a new hobby project without paying for WiFi and downloading shit from people I don’t know or trust? That is just unserious, when your competition is the much more mature gcc+make+vim combo, which is 100% offline and self-contained.

And yes, I’ve done this (start a new project in a plane with no internet). Many times. eg: the world’s only PalmOS 5 device emulator (uARM-palm) was started while I was in a plane.

You can start a project just fine? Cargo does not require a connection to function - you only need one when it’s time to pull in external dependencies.

And if you really dislike Cargo, nothing is stopping you from using rustc + make directly.

Pretty absurd conflation you've got there.

The package manager just offers a common interface for interop, you can still build without dependencies.

If your hobby project consumes libraries which are not already locally available on your machine, this same restriction would also apply when using gcc/make/vim. (e.g. say you want to use zlib, you'll need the zlib-devel package)

If the packages are already available locally, cargo works offline.