Rust has very arcane syntax and a lot of rules that developers coming from interpreted / garbage-collected languages (like the ones using these tools) would have a hard time grasping. It’s easy for people who are already familiar with it, but isn’t that always the case?
It makes no sense to me. You found it easier to contribute to Rust projects because... Rust projects are significantly easier to build? What? You can just do "dune build" in OCaml, or run "make" for many C projects. Plus, it is also significantly slower to build Rust projects, you should have probably added that.
> run "make" for many C projects.
This generally fails miserably, in my experience. It's normally a dance of error: libfoo missing, followed by install (which is generally only straightforward on linux), followed by libbar is missing etc.
Don't get me wrong, I have built lots of non-trivial C projects, but it's not straighforward at all (maybe if you always work in C it's easier).
I don't like autotools, but I suppose that would be a good fit here, and perhaps proper pre-build instructions (e.g. "pacman -S libfoo").
Totally, autotools helps. However, it's generally dependency issues that cause the problems, you're missing some header files etc. Finding out about these at configure time is better, but there's still a bunch of toil in identifying and getting those dependencies.
Yes, I meant the words I said. I haven't used OCaml, and some C projects are "just make" but that's not the rule like it is with Rust projects.
The time I spend doing things is much more valuable than the time my computer spends doing things.
I can only speak for why I like to know a project is written in Rust. I didn't add the build time because I didn't care.
I'm saying the opposite, actually. I found it easier to contribute to Rust projects (with zero hours Rust experience, and much Python/Java/C/C++/Ada) because Rust projects are significantly easier to build. (Just a `cargo build` in the default case.)