To get to your core point; I agree python without a virtual env, just raw python, is definintely not bulky. I'd argue its much more lightweight than cargo. My comment was because sounds like OP could be new-ish to programming, and, for a number of projects (ex; Android development), going from a big IDE to just a plaintext editor + command line commands can be a really painful jump. I remeber a Java course having a series of IDE tutorials and I could not for the life of me figure out the plaintext+commandline equivlent. The same can happen for certain python projects if a tutorial expects the editor to set the PYTHONPATH and the project has a venv, and the tutorial expects the editor's terminals start already-inside python virtual environment. That kind of stuff can make 'python without an IDE" confusing and daunting to someone merely following PyCharm tutorials.

I just wanted to assure OP they likely wouldn't have that kind of experince with Rust. AFAIK Rust tutorials rarely (if ever) assume an IDE.

Being not-bulky isn't a rust specific thing, a half-decent package manager meets the qualitification, but OP was asking about Rust and might not know.

Vanilla cargo.toml files are more akin to a requirements.txt than any of the others, which allow you to do things like set variables or create run scripts. However, vanilla cargo.toml files have some minimal Make functionality so it’s a bit more than just project dependencies. Each of those ecosystems has a slightly different approach to handling build tooling and dependency management. Rust puts the basic build and dependencies in one file with the assumption your system has the right Rust version, which is a lot simpler than others.