I was vaguely aware that some ancient architectures had weird byte widths, but I did not know about this. Pretty interesting.

This paper cannot succeed without mentioning the PDP-10 (though noting that PDP-11 has 8-bit bytes), and the fact that some DSPs have 24-bit or 32-bit words treated as “bytes.” These architectures made sense in their era, where word sizes varied and the notion of a byte wasn’t standardized. Today, nearly every general-purpose and embedded system adheres to the 8-bit byte model. The question isn’t whether there are still architectures where bytes aren’t 8-bits (there are!) but whether these care about modern C++… and whether modern C++ cares about them.

The file is named Cargo.toml. Whatever dependencies you add to there are automatically downloaded by Cargo. You can manage them with cargo add and cargo remove.

cargo install is not the same thing. That installs binaries. I last installed cargo-release to automate the annoying part of managing git tags and crate version number.