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APT Rust requirement raises questions

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Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#331

Post by major505 »

IS funny because thanks to efforts from companies like Valve, Linux seens to finally been receiving the recognition it deserves, Rust evangelists and weirdos who claim morality superiority to the rest of mortals, are going to put everything to loose, because of this obsession of rewriting tools that actually work for many years without bigger issues, just so they can say their language is superior.

IF there was some glaring problems with tools like sudo, sort, apt, and you have a superior version, sure, go ahead. But this is clearly not the case. Sometimes the rust version is just the same, or even inferior, but people are ready to plunge into destruction just to say their distro have the latest and greatest. Its just vanity.

Maybe the conspiracy theories that big tech finance the crazy incopetent people from in position of power in open source projects that they no longer can compete, in order to destroy them from the inside, is not that far fetched.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#332

Post by kstrauser »

xscott wrote: post #283
steveklabnik wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue though is that this isn't a solvable "problem". This is how programming languages' syntax work. It's like saying that C's if syntax is bad because these are equivalent: if (x > y) { if ((x > y)) { if (((x) > (y))) { Yes, one of your co-workers may write the third form. But it's just not possible for a programming language to stop this from existing, or at least, maybe you could do it, but it would add a ton…

Only `b` has the equivalent of "superfluous parens". It's practically your job to defend Rust, so I don't expect you to budge even one inch. However, I hate the idea of letting you mislead the casual reader that this is somehow equivalent and "just how languages work". The grammar could've used `Generic[Specific]` with square brackets and avoided the need for the turbo fish.

> The grammar could've used `Generic[Specific]` with square brackets and avoided the need for the turbo fish.

But then people would grouse about it using left-bracket and right-bracket as brackets in a type "context".

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#333

Post by antonvs »

layer8 wrote: post #326
antonvs wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the drive to rewrite software in Rust is a reaction to the decades-long dependence on C and C++. Many people out there sit in the burning room like the dog in that meme, saying "this is fine". Most of them don't have to deal at all directly with the consequences involved. Rust is the first language for a long time with a chance at improving this situation. A lot of the pushback against evangelism is from peop…

You can’t change things faster than persuading the people that maintain the things. Over-the-top evangelism doesn’t work well for persuasion.

That was probably a mischaracterization on my part. I wouldn't consider rewriting almost everything useful that's currently in C or C++ to be over the top. That would be a net good.

Posts that say "I rewrote X in Rust!" shouldn't actually be controversial. Every time you see one, you should think to yourself wow, the software world is moving towards being more stable and reliable, that's great!

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#334

Post by mixmastamyk »

WD-42 wrote: post #116
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’ve been writing python professionally for over 10 years. In the last year I’ve been writing more and most Rust. At first I thought the same as you. It’s a fugly language, there’s no denying it. But once I started to learn what all the weird syntax was for, it began to ruin Python for me. Now I begrudge any time I have to go back to python. It feels like its beauty is only skin deep, but the ugly details are right t…

Those complaints have very little to do with the syntax.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#335

Post by duped »

xscott wrote: post #318
gpm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like complaining that in C you can write a->b (a->b) (*a).b ((*a).b) Being able to use disambiguated syntaxes, and being able to add extra brackets, isn't an issue. PS. The formatting tooling normalizes your second and third example to the same syntax. Personally I think it ought to normalize both of them to the first syntax as well, but it's not particularly surprising that it doesn't because they aren't thi…

> This is like complaining that in C [...] It's really not. Only one of my examples has the equivalent of superfluous parens, and none are dereferencing anything. And I'm not defending C or C++ anyways. When I was trying to learn Rust (the second time), I wanted to know how to make my own types. As such, the macro `vec!` mentioned elsewhere isn't really relevant. I was using `Vec` to figure things out so I could make…

> let v = Vec::new(); // Crap, I want to specify the type of Vec

This kinda implies you've gone wrong somewhere. That doesn't mean there aren't cases where you need type annotations (they certainly exist!) but that if `Vec::new()` doesn't compile because the compiler couldn't deduce the type, it implies something is off with your code.

It's impossible to tell you exactly what the problem was, just that `>::new()` is not code that you would ever see in a Rust codebase.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#336

Post by pjmlp »

razighter777 wrote: post #172
geerlingguy wrote: post #5

I remembered reading about this news back when that first message was posted on the mailing list, and didn't think much of it then (rust has been worming its way into a lot of places over the past few years, just one more thing I tack on for some automation)... But seeing the maintainer works for Canonical, it seems like the tail (Ubuntu) keeps trying to wag the dog (Debian ecosystem) without much regard for the wide…

Agreed. I think that announcement was unprofessional. This was a unilateral decision affecting other's hard work, and the author didn't provide them the opportunity to provide feedback on the change. It disregards the importance of ports. Even if an architecture isn't widely used, supporting multiple architectures can help reveal bugs in the original implementation that wouldn't otherwise be obvious. This is breaking…

I fully agree, and in what concerns command line utility applications I see no benefit of using Rust's borrow checker.

At most if a rewrite would happen, it makes much more sense in a compiled language with automatic resource management.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#337

Post by steveklabnik »

renewiltord wrote: post #302

Overall, I think Rust is probably too dangerous to introduce into core software. Every time there is a donation to the Rust Foundation, the Rust community is in an uproar that it is not a large enough fraction of gross revenue. Linux, apt, are all currently both free as in speech and free as in beer. If we have to start donating to the Rust Foundation a percentage of gross revenue for every tool that we use written i…

> Every time there is a donation to the Rust Foundation, the Rust community is in an uproar that it is not a large enough fraction of gross revenue.

Where are you seeing this happen? I'm curious because I never have, which means that I'm missing out on discussions somewhere.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#338

Post by JuniperMesos »

enriquto wrote: post #96
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 am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. Well if you come from C++ it's a breath of fresh air! Rust is like a "cleaned-up" C++, that does not carry the historical baggage forced by backwards compatibility. It is well-thought out from the start. The syntax may appear a bit too synthetic; but that's just the first day of use. If you use it for a few days, you'll soon find that it's a great, beautiful languag…

> The main problem with rust is that the community around it has embraced all the toxic traditions of the js/node ecosystem, and then some. Cargo is a terrifying nightmare. If you could install regular rust dependencies with "apt install" in debian stable, that would be a different story! But no. They want the version churn: continuously adding and removing bugs, like particle/anti-particle pairs at the boundary of a black hole.

Something I didn't appreciate for a long time is that, the C/C++ ecosystem does have an npm-like package management ecosystem - it is just implemented at the level of Linux distro maintainers DDD deciding what to package and how. Which worked ok because C was the lingua franca of Unix systems.

But actually it's valuable for programmers to be able to specify their dependencies for their own projects and update them on a schedule unconnected and uncoordinated with the OS's releases. The cargo/npm model is closer to ideal.

Of course what is even better is NixOS-like declarative specification and hashing of all dependencies

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#339

Post by pessimizer »

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 think the problem for people is the traditional problem that a lot of people have had with a lot of languages since C took off: it doesn't look like ALGOL, and doesn't have the semantics of ALGOL.

The reason python looks like procedural pseudocode is because it was designed to look like procedural pseudocode. Rust is not just a new skin over ALGOL with a few opinionated idioms, it's actually different - mostly to give hints of intention to the compiler, but I don't even think it started from the same place. It's more functional than anything imo, but without caring about purity or appearance, and that resulted in something that superficially looks sufficiently ALGOL-like to confuse people who are used to python or Kotlin.

> I genuinely believe that languages ought to start with "newbie friendliness", and would love to hear challenges to that idea.

In conclusion, I think this is a red herring. Computer languages are hard. What you're actually looking for is something that is ALGOL-like for people who have already done the hard work of learning an ALGOL-like. That's not a newbie, though. Somebody who learned Rust first would make the same complaint about python.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#340

Post by pjmlp »

antonvs wrote: post #309
travisgriggs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love and use rust, it is my favorite language and I use it in several of my OSS projects but I'm tired of this "rewrite it in rust" evangilism and the reputational damage they do to the rust community. Thanks for this. I know intellectually, that there are sane/pragmatic people who appreciate Rust. But often the vibe I’ve gotten is the evangelism, the clear “I’ve found a tribe to be part of and it makes me feel s…

Much of the drive to rewrite software in Rust is a reaction to the decades-long dependence on C and C++. Many people out there sit in the burning room like the dog in that meme, saying "this is fine". Most of them don't have to deal at all directly with the consequences involved. Rust is the first language for a long time with a chance at improving this situation. A lot of the pushback against evangelism is from peop…

Except in many of such cases, like here in apt, any compiled language with GC/RC would do.

This is the kind of UNIX stuff that we would even write in Perl or Tcl back in the day.

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