The amount of contortions the author has had to go through is ridiculous, and all because the target operating system is Windows, and doesn't yet ship a production ripe UNIX userland (hence no AWK, sed, or zsh/tcsh/ksh out of the box). As a colleague of mine always says: give Wintendo no chance!
Despite that, Windows is still the most popular desktop OS in the world by an enormous margin. You don't help a friend who needs to rename a load of files by saying "well, it'd be much easier if you first installed Linux". Or cygwin, or even the Windows Subsystem for Linux if they're running Windows 10 Anniversary Update.
You help a friend by giving him a one liner COMMAND.COM shell script, instead of turning it into a cross-compiling hackfest just because you're a Rust fanboy (in author's own words).
Or, you figure out the cross-compilation steps and document them for the whole Rust community, because there isn't yet a readily searchable resource on it. I actually knew exactly what I was doing with this, and it wasn't just solving that one specific problem. It was solving a bunch of different issues, including some for the whole Rust community, some for my own personal experience, and that one for my friend. Heck, I asked him if he minded waiting while I did all of this, and he gave the thumbs-up. ;)
How is the one-liner shell script more helpful to the friend than the resulting binary? Yes it was convoluted but the point was the code author had to jump through hoops, not the end user.
