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APT Rust requirement raises questions

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Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#41

Post by steveklabnik »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

Syntax tends to be deeply personal. I would say the most straightforward answer to your question is "many people disagree that it is unreadable."

Rust did build on the learnings of the past 20 years. Essentially all of its syntax was taken from other languages, even lifetimes.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#42

Post by stonemetal12 »

fn-mote wrote: post #20

The most interesting criticism / idea in the article was that the parts that are intended for Rust-ification should actually be removed from core apt. > it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats [...] from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates [...] Another interesting, although perhaps tangential, criticism was that th…

Given that Cargo is written in Rust, you would think there would be at least one battle tested solver that could be used. Perhaps it was harder to extract and make generic than write a new one?

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#43

Post by bakugo »

simonask wrote: post #25
bakugo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they wouldn't experience so much pushback if they were more humble, had more respect for established software and practices, and were more open to discussion. You can't go around screaming "your code SUCKS and you need to rewrite it my way NOW" at everyone all the time and expect people to not react negatively.

That’s also not something anybody has actually said.

Are you serious? It's basically impossible to discuss C/C++ anymore without someone bringing up Rust.

If you search for HN posts with C++ in the title from the last year, the top post is about how C++ sucks and Rust is better. The fourth result is a post titled "C++ is an absolute blast" and the comments contain 128 (one hundred and twenty eight) mentions of the word "Rust". It's ridiculous.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#44

Post by lkjdsklf »

simonask wrote: post #25
bakugo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they wouldn't experience so much pushback if they were more humble, had more respect for established software and practices, and were more open to discussion. You can't go around screaming "your code SUCKS and you need to rewrite it my way NOW" at everyone all the time and expect people to not react negatively.

That’s also not something anybody has actually said.

While no one has explicitly said that, it is the implied justification of rewriting so much stuff in rust

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#45

Post by amarant »

bakugo wrote: post #2

[flagged]

from the outside it looks like a defense mechanism from a group of developers who have been suffering crusades against them ever since a very prolific c developer decided rust would be a good fit for this rather successful project he created in his youth.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#46

Post by shmolyneaux »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

I would encourage you to give it a try anyways. Unfamiliar syntax is off-putting for sure, but you can get comfortable with any syntax.

Coming from Python, I needed to work on some legacy Perl code. Perl code looks quite rough to a new user. After time, I got used to it. The syntax becomes a lot less relevant as you spend more time with the language.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#47

Post by saghm »

epolanski wrote: post #11
petcat wrote: post #3

Interesting how instead of embracing Rust as a required toolchain for APT, the conversation quickly devolved into "why don't we just build a tool that can translate memory-safe Rust code into memory-unsafe C code? Then we don't have to do anything." This feels like swimming upstream just for spite.

The problem is that rust is being shoved in pointless places with a rewrite-everything-in-rust mentality. There's lunatics that want to replace basic Unix tools like sudo, etc, that are battle tested since ages which has been a mess of bugs till now. Instead Rust should find it's niches beyond rewriting what works, but tackling what doesn't.

FWIW sudo has been maintained by an OpenBSD developer for a while now but got replaced in the base system by doas. Independent of any concerns about Rust versus C, I don't think it's quite as unreasonable as you're claiming to consider alternatives to sudo given that the OS that maintains it felt that it was flawed enough to be worth writing a replacement for from scratch.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#48

Post by catlifeonmars »

fn-mote wrote: post #20

The most interesting criticism / idea in the article was that the parts that are intended for Rust-ification should actually be removed from core apt. > it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats [...] from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates [...] Another interesting, although perhaps tangential, criticism was that th…

Dependency solvers are actually an area that can benefit from updating IMO.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#50

Post by simonask »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

What are you talking about? Rust’s function signature and type declaration syntaxes are extremely vanilla, unless you venture into some really extreme use cases with lots of lifetime annotations and generic bounds.

I seriously don’t get it.

    fn add(a: i32, b: i32) -> i32 { … }
Where’s the “Perl-esqueness”?
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