cargo new will now default to generating a binary, rather than a library. We try to keep Cargo’s CLI quite stable, but this change is important, and is unlikely to cause breakage.

For some background, cargo new accepts two flags: --lib, for creating libraries, and --bin, for creating binaries, or executables. If you don’t pass one of these flags, it used to default to --lib. At the time, we made this decision because each binary (often) depends on many libraries, and so we thought the library case would be more common. However, this is incorrect; each library is depended upon by many binaries. Furthermore, when getting started, what you often want is a program you can run and play around with. It’s not just new Rustaceans though; even very long-time community members have said that they find this default surprising. As such, we’ve changed it, and it now defaults to --bin.