It's kind of the-chicken-and-the-egg scenario. I wanted a hospitable development environment to build a hospitable development environment. Also, prebuilt binaries work just fine. I made this in around eleven hours, so it should be fairly easy to rewrite in other languages if that is what the community wants. This project is already getting a lot more attention than I was expecting, and it is definitely still in alpha. However, you can use whatever tools you want to use.

A good goal for these sorts of projects is bootstrapping - can you build seastar with seastar?

Since Seastar is written in Rust, and I don't have Rust support yet...no. However, it should be fairly simple to add. Despite what people want me to do, I am not going to fully reimplement Cargo -- it took the Rust devs years, and I'm just one person. However, I can call Cargo with the correct flags and config files to interface with my existing code, and I am planning on doing that soon.

Arguably a package manager shouldn't be so complex that it takes many developers years to implement.

As opposed to taking like 30 seconds to install cargo and rust?

I get that the elegant thing to do would be to bootstrap this, but in practice does this actually cost you anything, or is this a purely aesthetic concern?

> As opposed to taking like 30 seconds to install cargo and rust?

I think you're oblivious to the problem domain. C and C++ projects are tightly coupled with build systems. If you are not smack middle in the happy path, you will experience problems. Having to onboard an external language and obscure toolset just to be able to start a hello world is somewhere between a hard sell and an automatic rejection.