Gemini CLI

Ugh, I really wish this had been written in Go or Rust. Just something that produces a single binary executable and doesn't require you to install a runtime like Node.

Projects like this have to update frequently, having a mechanism like npm or pip or whatever to automatically handle that is probably easier. It's not like the program is doing heavy lifting anyway, unless you're committing outright programming felonies there shouldn't be any issues on modern hardware.

It's the only argument I can think of, something like Go would be goated for this use case in principle.

> having a mechanism like npm or pip or whatever to automatically handle that is probably easier

Re-running `cargo install <crate>` will do that. Or install `cargo-update`, then you can bulk update everything.

And it works hella better than using pip in a global python install (you really want pipx/uvx if you're installing python utilities globally).

IIRC you can install Go stuff with `go install`, dunno if you can update via that tho.

This whole thread is a great example of the developer vs. user convenience trade-off.

A single, pre-compiled binary is convenient for the user's first install only.

I don’t think that’s true. For instance, uv is a single, pre-compiled binary, and I can just run `uv self update` to update it to the latest version.

I literally wouldn’t use uv if it weren’t available via pip.

Reasoning: it’s a Python tool, therefore it shouldn’t require anything (any 3rd party package manager) beyond Python.

It’s a standalone binary. It doesn’t require anything at all. It’s literally just one file you can put anywhere you like. It doesn’t need a third-party package manager.