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Rust's users are all developers so there's no distinction between expert and novice users.

I built rustfmt with nightly Rust and it dynamically links all kinds of shared objects from the Rust install. This doesn't happen for a simple hello world so there must be something different in rustfmt's build.




There is an important distinction when it comes to stability. Stability for libraries is much more important that stability for devtools

Stability mainly matters when you release a library and it stops working on a newer compiler, breaking everyone downstream. That's a pain for the downstream users, because they need not necessarily understand your library internals, and the software they're building will be completely broken until you update it.

If an optional developer tool breaks, it's only you that's affected, not downstream users. You can wait for it to be fixed, no problem.

Rustfmt uses internal Rust APIs to parse and reason about the code. It could use something else (like syntex), but that would be more work.


Can't rustfmt avoid dynamic linking?


Actually, I'm surprised it does link dynamically, since Rust binaries are typically statically linked. But yes, it should be able to avoid that.




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