Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

jonashietala.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 116 posts

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#11

Post by mynameisash »

> Several external dependencies.

> It’s annoying to install all these and to keep them up-to-date, it would be great to just have a single thing to worry about.

I feel the author's pain.

There's a Python2 project for ebook management that I used pretty extensively years ago, but it depended on a number of external dependencies, both as compiled shared objects and other Python libraries. It felt extremely fragile and was always a pain to get it working properly, so I eventually rewrote the core parts of the entire project for my own use (in Rust, incidentally). Now I have a single app that I can be sure will pretty much always work.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#12

Post by bbkane »

Tesl wrote: post #3

This is a cool idea, I've wanted to find a Rust project for a while and regenerating my own site (which uses jekyll) might not be a bad idea too. Every time I come back to mine it never works because it always complains about the wrong ruby library versions being installed.

I switched from Jekyll to Zola because of my difficulty running Jekyll locally too. I chose Zola because it's a single binary and its template language (Tera) is similar to Jekyll's so my blog was fairly easy to port.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#13

Post by asicsp »

impoppy wrote: post #7

I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…

I moved from Jekyll to Zola and it's been great until I started tinkering with templates and stuff recently. Single binary and simple themes were main reasons to choose this. Wanted a feature that wasn't present in the version I started with (about 2 years ago). So, I got the newest version and a few things broke subtly (ex: syntax highlighting). Which led me to tinkering (I don't know much about HTML/CSS/etc).

It was actually good to try a few things almost blindly and then slowly narrowing with a bit more thought process. Been a long time since I had such fun investigating unknown codebase. This even helped me move my post processing scripts to templates. And then I went a step further by reading about meta tags (things like image, description, etc) and adding them via an extra variable in the post frontmatter.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#14

Post by burntsushi »

impoppy wrote: post #7

I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…

I plan on writing a static site generator soon myself. And I briefly wondered the same thing and realized that I could very easily answer that question: ruthlessly build whatever I personally need and not what others need. I don't usually follow that line of thinking, but the static site generator space is so full of so many great tools that I don't think there's really anything for me to contribute to it.

Instead, I think the killer feature of my static site generator is going to be exactly what makes it difficult for others to use: its tight coupling with my specific use case. I'll be able to hard-code configuration knobs. Avoid dealing with edge cases. Bake strange non-generic and single-blog-post-specific logic right into the tool.

(The reason why I want to build my own is because I've tried using someone else's. And I just keep getting bitten: someone else's tool gets so big and moves so rapidly, that by the time I get around to updating my site, something about the new version of the tool has broken the way my web site works. And then I usually have to spend hours figuring out how to fix it, which is hugely deflating because I had just worked up the energy to write a new post. My naive belief is that if I have my own tool that evolves at precisely the pace I want it to, I won't run into that specific problem. I'll run into other problems of course, but I'm thinking that I'll prefer those problems to the ones I currently face.)

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#15

Post by benreesman »

dceddia wrote: post #5

Fun project! I really resonate with this part > But I haven’t used Haskell in years, and the overhead for me to add slightly more complex things to the site is quite large I’m starting to come around to the idea that it might be better to avoid shiny fun things in favor of having most of my active projects use the same stack, or at least the same few languages. I’ve got a blog in Jekyll (with some Ruby-based customiz…

There’s a lot of wisdom in that observation.

Knowing a lot of languages well is a super-power in some ways, but heavily polyglot environments create real pragmatic challenges. There’s a reason so many marquee shops carefully curate a (short) menu of production languages.

It’s been my experience that if (and it’s a big if) you have either the need or inclination to operate a big orgy of polyglot language interop, the hellacious learning curves on NixOS and Bazel are “The Way”. It’s a big investment and only worth it if you’re pretty committed/obligated, but there is a path for those whose needs justify the cost.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#16

Post by taftster »

benreesman wrote: post #9

It’s refreshing to see a front-page Rust piece that just nails it on promoting the language. It cites concrete examples of where the rubber really meets the road: e.g. Cargo as a one-stop-shop for platform insensitive, “just works” build and dep management. It acknowledges that it’s ok for fun and novelty to be features, which it is! It steers well clear of A >> B nonsense. No preachy TED talk about memory safety. It…

Your comment helped me want to click through and read the post. I'm very tired of all the recent Rust fanboy posts, but level-headed and earnest comparisons against real implementations make for much better understanding of a new concept or language.

Here are some select quotes from the article:

> Please note that this is not to say that Rust this [sic] much faster than Haskell, instead see it as a comparison of two implementations. I’m sure someone could make it super fast in Haskell.

> I don’t think it means that Rust is simpler or easier than Haskell, it just means that I personally had an easier time to grok Rust than Haskell.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#17

Post by impoppy »

asicsp wrote: post #13
impoppy wrote: post #7

I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…

I moved from Jekyll to Zola and it's been great until I started tinkering with templates and stuff recently. Single binary and simple themes were main reasons to choose this. Wanted a feature that wasn't present in the version I started with (about 2 years ago). So, I got the newest version and a few things broke subtly (ex: syntax highlighting). Which led me to tinkering (I don't know much about HTML/CSS/etc). It wa…

That's exactly why I never used Jekyll and don't really understand people that use it nowadays. It is AWFUL. Not only it uses greatly outdated Ruby, you also HAVE to install outdated Ruby on your machine to play with themes, serve, compile and are forced to use RVM. I know GitHub Pages can compile the page for you, but when you want to customize a theme you have to go through all that hell. It's just a terrible experience. And installing plugins is another hell.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#18

Post by impoppy »

burntsushi wrote: post #14
impoppy wrote: post #7

I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…

I plan on writing a static site generator soon myself. And I briefly wondered the same thing and realized that I could very easily answer that question: ruthlessly build whatever I personally need and not what others need. I don't usually follow that line of thinking, but the static site generator space is so full of so many great tools that I don't think there's really anything for me to contribute to it. Instead, I…

Sounds cool, I hope one day I stumble upon your article that utilizes those very custom hard-coded knobs. Yet I wouldn't make a tool like that since tools should be KISS.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#20

Post by burntsushi »

impoppy wrote: post #18
burntsushi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I plan on writing a static site generator soon myself. And I briefly wondered the same thing and realized that I could very easily answer that question: ruthlessly build whatever I personally need and not what others need. I don't usually follow that line of thinking, but the static site generator space is so full of so many great tools that I don't think there's really anything for me to contribute to it. Instead, I…

Sounds cool, I hope one day I stumble upon your article that utilizes those very custom hard-coded knobs. Yet I wouldn't make a tool like that since tools should be KISS.

KISS is exactly my point. :)
Post reply on HN