They're not doing so here, but shipping a wasm-compiled binary with npm that uses node's WASI API is a really easy way to ship a cross-platform CLI utility. Just needs ~20 lines of JS wrapping it to set up the args and file system.

I found that strange as well. My guess is that `npm` is just the package manager people are most likely to already have installed and doing it this way makes it easy. They might think asking people to install Cargo is too much effort. Wonder if the pattern of using npm to install non-node tools will keep gaining traction.

NPM as a cross platform package distribution system works really well.

The install script checks the OS and Arch, and pulls the right Rust binary.

Then, they get upgrade mechanism out of the box too, and an uninstall mechanism.

NPM has become the de facto standard for installing any software these days, because it is present on every OS.

Interesting fact, because cargo builds every tool it downloads from source, you can’t actually run cargo install on Google laptops internally.

Why should the package's original language matter?

When I use apt-get, I have no idea what languages the packages were written in.