The latest nixers newsletter linked to an article with the same title as this thread.

After reading it, I'm prompted to ask: is the trend to rewrite so many utilities in Rust or Go an example of minimalism, or of bloat?

I'm tempted to say the latter, because I don't care for the toolchains they bring along. Any time I look at the git repository for some tempting project and see references to cargo, I say no thank you. I dislike that almost as much as cmake.

(It's taken me years to grudgingly accept autotools. But it's still a strike against any program that uses them.)

And maybe I'm misunderstanding or overreacting but golang apparently has a worrisome style of pulling dependencies out of the cloud. Um, no, I'm not comfortable with that either.

What do my fellow nixers think? Am I just a crotchety old C programmer who likes simple makefiles? and everything statically linked and preferably less than a megabyte after stripping (less than 500K even better)?