Should we rewrite entirely in Rust?

[davidanthoff]

Maybe a little silly, but I've been seriously thinking whether we maybe should just use Rust for everything here, i.e. the launcher and juliaup itself. Some benefits:

• I think cross-platform might be easier.
• juliaup wouldn't be 300MB, but just a few KB. This is really the major benefit, I think.
• The entire codebase would be in one language.
• For the kind of program we have here, a statically typed language with strong security guarantees like Rust is actually probably a better fit than Julia's dynamic nature...
• I get to try Rust ;)

I'll look a bit into it. I think at the moment the codebase is small enough that this might actually not be completely crazy...

[davidanthoff]

Just a heads-up: this is happening :) I've thought a bit more about the integration of the VS Code extension with juliaup, and for that scenario it is really quite crucial that juliaup itself is a small, nimble little program that we can spawn quickly, keep many instances in memory at the same time etc. I don't see how we could achieve that with PackageCompiler.jl at the moment, so Rust just seems a better choice at the moment.