> Does this ultimately boil down to "go install" (or whatever the Rust equivalent is) is easier to deal with than "./configure; make"?

Well, yeah. For once, "./configure; make" doesn't work on Windows. So you need CMake, or SCons, or Boost Jam, or any other cross platform build system. Then you have different ways of getting dependent libraries, like zlib. In short, the C/C++ cross platform "packaging" is just a mess.

> OS package managers

Already ruled out the most common OS with that phrase.

Well there is the windows app store these days. Probably no cli software offered, and no third party repositories, though. And there's chocolatey, which may be of use

The Windows store now includes entire Linux distributions, which come with all their CLI and repository goodness. I don't know about native Windows CLI stuff though - WSL is so good that I've switched pretty much entirely to that (Windows commands can run from Linux Bash when they're occasionally needed).

I think the tools speak for themselves. They get use and then they get included in repos, not just by virtue of the fact they were written in lang X.

Then why advertise that? Why not advertise their benefits instead (fast, cross-platform, easy install)? "Written in X" is only useful to advertise pedagogy or integration.

Shorthand. Compare the lengths of these two strings:

    > fast, cross-platform, easy install

    > Written in Rust

Also note how the second statement expresses a single concept; whereas the first statement is a list of concepts that must be memorized and reproduced by rote, and is therefore constantly at-risk of being stated incompletely or inaccurately.

(And it is incomplete: there are many more reasons why "Written in Rust" might be important, such as correctness, security, and ease of maintenance/refactoring.)

* * * * *

Alternatively: why convey a set of vague descriptors when you can instead convey precisely why they are applicable, and let the audience's pre-existing memories fill in the details for them?

Like I said, "written in X" conveys pedagogy and integration. (Or, if we're being cynical, hip language clickbait.) It's not a very good shorthand.

Because it's a post for hackernews, and we're mostly engineers and developers so we care to know what it's written in. Rust is a awesome new language with growing popularity and it gets hits whenever it's posted.