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A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

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Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#21
post #11

Serious question: why Rust? Sounds like this is not exactly systems level programming or any user would suffer from or even notice garbage collection latency. Is Rust building up a decent ecosystem now for application programming? When I tried developing in Rust I came to the conclusion that you pay a heavy price for not having a garbage collector. Was I doing it wrong?

I find Rust super ergonomic for any kind of app. The memory management aspect is trivial and second nature to anyone used to unmanaged languages, and the type system equally is not difficult to understand. It's a general purpose language, but it does give you full control. Plus, of course, you can encode a large amount of program states in the type system and borrowing checks enforce rules that programmers usually ha…

As someone used to unamaged languages since 1986, and with a major focused on systems programing, it isn't that clear cut.

Rust executables are only 100% static on OSes that expose system libraries as static libraries, and there are not many of those around, outside embedded systems.

Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#22

Why no MacOS support if you claim cross-platform? That's not honest.

It's still cross platform, just across Linux and Windows, doesn't look dishonest. It's similar to other "linux/macos"-only tools that also call themselves cross platform.

The baffling part though is recommending using homebrew to install it on linux.

Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#23

Serious question: why Rust? Sounds like this is not exactly systems level programming or any user would suffer from or even notice garbage collection latency. Is Rust building up a decent ecosystem now for application programming? When I tried developing in Rust I came to the conclusion that you pay a heavy price for not having a garbage collector. Was I doing it wrong?

The primary purpose of Rust is to write Rust. It is only the secondary purpose to actually write useful things.

Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#24

Serious question: why Rust? Sounds like this is not exactly systems level programming or any user would suffer from or even notice garbage collection latency. Is Rust building up a decent ecosystem now for application programming? When I tried developing in Rust I came to the conclusion that you pay a heavy price for not having a garbage collector. Was I doing it wrong?

[deleted]

Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#26
There are many of these tools but i don't like to think of these things like dotfiles. What is a dotfile? A `.something` file in my home dir? is /etc/environment a dotfile? No, but i wan't to manage it still. What about Librewolf policies.json in /usr/lib64/librewolf/policies or similar. It's not a dotfile either. For some tools, i need some other tools to exist already in path. What about zsh where i want to sync 3 git repos for syntax highlighting and other scripts? Also what about secrets, maybe i want some encrypted stuff so i need a solution for that also.

Ansible is the best for these things, no symlinks needed, just configure what you want to exist and where and you can template configs or copy them or use some modules like `git_config` to then generate that ini file etc. Ansible vault also handles encryption easily so i can manage ssh keys, passwords...

Re: A cross-platform multi-target dotfiles manager written in Rust

#27
post #17

Serious question: why Rust? Sounds like this is not exactly systems level programming or any user would suffer from or even notice garbage collection latency. Is Rust building up a decent ecosystem now for application programming? When I tried developing in Rust I came to the conclusion that you pay a heavy price for not having a garbage collector. Was I doing it wrong?

Syntactically it's a pretty nice language, with a nice and sane ecosystem (crates, etc), and it's fun to write (which is a pro especially for unpaid hobby projects). If you get used to it, it's nice to write various things in it. I'd probably use it for CLI tools at this point. You do pay a bit in syntactic overhead (lifetimes, borrow checking perplexities), though you get used to it. I'd still not use it for a stand…

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