At the risk of being that guy, I haven't had any issues onboarding people onto native projects written in Rust. rustup does a great job of fetching the required toolchains without issue. I'd imagine the same is also true of Go or Zig.

While Microsoft <3 Rust, there are still some quality tooling parity to reach versus Visual Studio abilities for .NET, Python and C++.

Incremental compilation, and linking, parallel builds, hot code reloading, REPL, graphical debugging optimised builds, GPU debugging....

Go is better left for devops stuff like Docker and Kubernetes, and Zig remains to be seen when it becomes industry relevant beyond HN and Reddit forums.

I'm pretty people who write and build C++ on Windows do it for good reasons, often reasons that are out of their control. Your comment is not going to make any difference.

Before rustup can run, the very first message rustup-init spits out is asking to install the visual studio tool chain.

You have to do this for certain rust things too. I can't remember which, but I inevitably run into a need to install the MSVC toolchain to compile rust. I think it might be related to FFI, or libs which use FFI? The same thing comes up in Linux, but the process to install it is different.

I got anxiety reading the article, describing exactly why it sucks. It's nice to know from the article and comments here there are ways around it, but the way I have been doing it was the "hope I check the right checkboxes and wait a few hours" plan. There is usually one "super checkbox" that will do the right things.

I have to do this once per OS [re]install generally.