dotnet new, Meet cargo new: A Tale of Two CLIs

It’s Day 2 of my journey learning Rust as a longtime C# developer, and today I took the plunge: I installed Rust and created my first project. The whole thing felt a bit like unpacking a new toolbox—familiar enough to recognize the tools, but different enough that I had to check the manual.

Let’s walk through how installing Rust compares to getting started with .NET and how cargo stacks up against our old friend dotnet.

Step One: Installing Rust (Yes, It’s Just One Command)

C# devs are used to Visual Studio installers and SDK juggling. With Rust, it’s… shockingly simple.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

That’s it. One command. rustup is Rust’s version manager, installer, and updater all in one. It even sets up your environment variables and gives you cargo, the Rust CLI by default.

I didn’t need a separate runtime or SDK or debate which version of Visual Studio to install, which was refreshing.

Want to verify the install? Just run:

rustc --version
cargo --version

Boom. You’re ready to code.

Step Two: Project Bootstrapping — cargo vs dotnet

In .NET land, we’ve all typed this at some point:

dotnet new console -n HelloWorld
cd HelloWorld
dotnet run

Rust’s version?

cargo new hello_world
cd hello_world
cargo run

It’s almost identical in spirit. But cargo does a few nice things right out of the gate:

• It initializes a Git repo for you by default.
• It gives you a Cargo.toml file (like .csproj, but… readable).
• It keeps source code in a src folder, which feels neat and tidy.

Here’s what you get from cargo new hello_world:

hello_world/
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── main.rs

And the default main.rs:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

No using directives, no class Program, no static void Main. Just a function and some curly braces. Minimalism, meet productivity.

Why cargo Feels Like the CLI I Always Wanted

If you’re coming from the .NET world, you’ll notice cargo bundles everything: it builds, runs, tests, adds dependencies, and even publishes your packages.

Need a new dependency? No NuGet commands, no UI dialogs—just:

cargo add serde

And cargo grabs it for you and updates your Cargo.toml. It’s as if dotnet, nuget, and MSBuild got together and decided to be one happy command. FYI, the serde package is a generic serialization/deserialization framework.

The Verdict: Setup That Gets Out of the Way

Installing Rust and getting started with cargo was fast and frictionless. It reminded me how refreshing it is when tooling just works and doesn’t require me to babysit it.

Tomorrow, I’ll get my hands dirty writing “Hello, World!” in both C# and Rust and start teasing apart the syntax differences.

Spoiler: One of them makes you think harder about semicolons.