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Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

jonashietala.se

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Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#91

Post by chrisjharris »

pdimitar wrote: post #80
burntsushi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a free hour unfortunately. And I know I'm not going to use that because I don't want to setup a Lua environment. Indeed, I have enough Lua experience to know that they break the language in big ways for what seems like every release. That's a liability. What happens when luapress stops getting regular maintenance and the version of Lua it uses is no longer packaged in my Linux distro? Oops. Ticking time…

> Static site generators are just too easy to build and too easy to let die. And the ones that don't die grow big and bloated. Sadly you're right. I've been monitoring in the trenches for a while and what you said is covering it perfectly. RE: maintenance, I was aware but was wondering whether Luapress is mature and complete enough to not need maintenance. I'll give it a go. And I truly get your point about point rel…

I also am quite neurotic about version control, updates etc and if you're prepared to climb up a fairly steep learning curve, I'd recommend Nix/NixOS. It's a much more robust and comprehensive solution than Docker. Docker is not as good a technology as it should be in this use case, and it does stuff like cacheing CMD instructions in the Dockerfile based on their value as a string (rather than the result of the command). This can and does lead to Docker images changing between builds even when the Dockerfile itself has not changed.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#92

Post by pdimitar »

chrisjharris wrote: post #91
pdimitar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Static site generators are just too easy to build and too easy to let die. And the ones that don't die grow big and bloated. Sadly you're right. I've been monitoring in the trenches for a while and what you said is covering it perfectly. RE: maintenance, I was aware but was wondering whether Luapress is mature and complete enough to not need maintenance. I'll give it a go. And I truly get your point about point rel…

I also am quite neurotic about version control, updates etc and if you're prepared to climb up a fairly steep learning curve, I'd recommend Nix/NixOS. It's a much more robust and comprehensive solution than Docker. Docker is not as good a technology as it should be in this use case, and it does stuff like cacheing CMD instructions in the Dockerfile based on their value as a string (rather than the result of the comma…

Yep, thanks for reminding me about Docker -- I just haven't figured out something much better yet. Maybe mini-VMs like Firecracker or just straight up qemu will be my final stops, who knows (as I plan to buy a workstation with hefty RAM amounts; will likely start at 256GB). I still have a lot of time to think about how to approach the whole thing.

--

For Nix, I think you know what I'll tell you: you don't recommend a war veteran with PTSD "just one last war". I get what they're trying to do but their discourse on various platforms has left much to be desired and they seem opposed to offer more ergonomic CLIs and/or UIs. I hear that's changing as well so I'll be checking them out a few times a year. As it is right now, I wouldn't even mind the steep learning curve -- I am not completely burned out and I still punch quite hard in my work -- but mysterious error messages and maintainers ending discussions with "well then it's not for you" et. al. are just not appealing and feel like I'm taking a risk that will not pay off. Nix still feels like somebody's experimentation project.

I truly hope they take off as their idea deserves but that must come with simplicity on the level of your average Joe and Jane pasting 2-3 commands in a terminal (sort of how you install Rust; it's literally two pasted commands). Before something similar happens, Nix is doomed to remain a niche curiosity.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#93

Post by radicalriddler »

munificent wrote: post #6

I also rewrote my blog's static site generator to a bespoke one (in Dart in my case), largely for performance reasons. Prior, I was using Jekyll and Pygments. Jekyll and Pygments are really slow. My new site generator is literally 100x faster, and I did, like, zero real optimization work. In fact, it can rebuild my entire blog and every post from scratch faster than Jekyll's watch mode (with caching set up properly)…

Is it open sourced? Would love to have a read of some dart not written by a Googler or Xoogler. Unless...

Edit: and... just read his bio

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#94

Post by Winsaucerer »

manholio wrote: post #70

Why even bother with a static generator when you can run rust code at essentially wire speed and dynamically generate all the required formatting on the fly? Because Rust binaries are so secure, you can expose them over the internet safely. With a little bit of glue, you can automatically recompile the CGI binary every time the rs source is touched, for a dev experience similar to interpreted web scripts.

I prefer to take your approach, but one advantage of a static generator is that it opens up hosting location options such as github pages, dropping in an S3 type public storage, many traditional web hosts, netlify, etc.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#95

Post by pjmlp »

rychco wrote: post #21
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…

(Ignoring the language itself for a moment) I absolutely love cargo. It’s so productive & easy to use. I have never had the pleasure of using such a painless cross platform build system. I’m neutral on Rust itself but Cargo is awesome.

CPAN, Maven, NuGET,...

It isn't as if it wasn't done before.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#96

Post by nyanpasu64 »

qudat wrote: post #62
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…

We think alike. I started out with Hugo because it's very popular and relatively easy to use. It has a bunch of features that I had to read about but didn't have a use for -- overhead. One of the most annoying aspects of working with hugo was the friction from idea to publishing it. I decided to go a completely different route and built https://prose.sh With prose all I have to do is to create a markdown file and the…

Can you use `hugo server` (much like `jekyll/zola serve`) and a local Git repo to polish up the content locally, explore various permutations, before pushing to a cloud-based host?

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#97

Post by chrismorgan »

rtpg wrote: post #90
csande17 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. The things a static site generator does are typically very simple: load some Markdown into memory, run it through some HTML templates, and maybe scale some pictures with ImageMagick if you're feeling especially fancy. Writing a script to do those things is way easier than trying to learn and wrangle a Static Site Generator(tm). The one time static stie generators are helpful is if you really, really like…

To this point: Markdown is a nice format for ingest because you can just paste in HTML. I am a bit more courageous and have some custom directives for my Markdown stuff, but it's all really 20 lines of code. I think it's tempting to add a bunch of "time saving" features for writing, but lots of time just going with the HTML is fine. Maybe if you're writing out a post every couple of days then you can focus on time sa…

Markdown is lousy in significant part because its interactions with HTML are ridiculously complex and moderately difficult to learn, and almost no one tries to actively learn Markdown in a principled fashion, and even fewer try teaching it in a principled fashion, so it ends up unreliable and fairly unpredictable to almost everyone. Things like: if you start a “paragraph” (of which “what comes after a blank line” is a fair approximation) with a block HTML element (e.g.

, ), inline Markdown syntax won’t work until you start a new “paragraph”. This is related to what I find to be the real killer for just pasting HTML: if you use blank lines followed by lines that are either indented (by at least four spaces or a tab) or don’t start with a block HTML element, then Markdown will mangle your input fiercely. And that’s extremely common (it’s basically recommended formatting for various content).

  
  Markdown syntax is *not* interpreted here, and this is a text node inside an aside.
—⁂—

  

  
Markdown syntax is *not* interpreted here, and this is a text node inside a p inside an aside.
—⁂—

  

  Markdown syntax *is* interpreted here, and `aside > p > em` should match.
—⁂—

  
      
Markdown syntax is *not* interpreted here, and this is a text node inside a p inside an aside.
—⁂—

  

      
This line is a code block (pre) inside an aside.
—⁂—

And all that is without taking into account variations in Markdown flavours, and what may happen with unprincipled and inconsistent extension of Markdown. All up, I say if you want sanity that will last, go HTML and avoid Markdown strenuously for anything beyond simple prose.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#98

Post by chrismorgan »

manholio wrote: post #70

Why even bother with a static generator when you can run rust code at essentially wire speed and dynamically generate all the required formatting on the fly? Because Rust binaries are so secure, you can expose them over the internet safely. With a little bit of glue, you can automatically recompile the CGI binary every time the rs source is touched, for a dev experience similar to interpreted web scripts.

> Because Rust binaries are so secure, you can expose them over the internet safely.

That doesn’t stand to reason. Safely in that you can confidently avoid things like remote code execution, sure. But that doesn’t necessarily protect you from denial of service attacks; for example, I expect most services built on Hyper to be vulnerable to slowloris attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)>, because I believe it still defaults to basically no sane kind of timeout, and doesn’t provide the tools to handle it properly anyway https://github.com/hyperium/hyper/issues/1628>. If that’s part of your threat model, you should avoid exposing it directly and use a reverse proxy.

Good somewhat related reading, on a technologically simple DoS attack on Rust-based code that was largely fixed by speeding things up, fixing caching and proper use of reverse proxying (via Cloudflare because it was genuinely heavy load): https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-won-free-load-testing

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#99

Post by ordu »

brundolf wrote: post #85
tomjakubowski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One great benefit of a good template language is automatic escaping (e.g. within HTML attributes or tags), which you won't get from format strings.

Is that important in a static site generator? In a server-rendered site you have to worry about injection attacks, but that's not really relevant when you're statically generating a site from content that's fully under your control

But then you'll need to watch for `` in examples of your articles, so you dont need to write it as `<script>`. And how you are going to get the second in your blog? How do you like to write `<script>`?

It is very convenient to have an automatic escaping of everything.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#100

Post by rtpg »

chrismorgan wrote: post #97
rtpg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this point: Markdown is a nice format for ingest because you can just paste in HTML. I am a bit more courageous and have some custom directives for my Markdown stuff, but it's all really 20 lines of code. I think it's tempting to add a bunch of "time saving" features for writing, but lots of time just going with the HTML is fine. Maybe if you're writing out a post every couple of days then you can focus on time sa…

Markdown is lousy in significant part because its interactions with HTML are ridiculously complex and moderately difficult to learn, and almost no one tries to actively learn Markdown in a principled fashion, and even fewer try teaching it in a principled fashion, so it ends up unreliable and fairly unpredictable to almost everyone. Things like: if you start a “paragraph” (of which “what comes after a blank line” is…

I think here you are also somewhat proving the point because you can "go HTML", since the problem is more about markdown not kicking in. I'm mostly kidding but since we are talking about "blogs" (mostly pictures and text) it's OK for there to be a bit of jank. Remember, this is a script for you! You do not have to justify the jank to anyone!

Seriously though, I think that what you're describing is a real failing of Markdown. I wanted at one point to use Restructured Text but really you want Sphinx and Sphinx is not meant to be used as a library unfortunately.

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