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Common *nix commands written in Rust

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Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#41

Post by dragonsh »

littlestymaar wrote: post #39
dragonsh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust solve memory issues of C/C++ at the cost of simplicity and with convoluted, complicated syntax. It will bring in new class of bugs when it becomes popular enough and when large parts of Firefox are rewritten in it. I am not sure why some programmers think, complex and convoluted the syntax, the better the language, especially taking rust as an example. Go has been successful in it’s niche as systems programming…

People who don't like Rust like to point at Zig as an alternative, but as long as it's developed by a single guy and there's a lot of breaking changes at each release, it isn't really an option. At this point this could still change a lot and even add a borrow checker! (Rust didn't start with it, it used to have a GC back in the 0.* releases)

Yes it’s started by one man like Go by Dennis and Python by Guido and many more, only time will tell.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#42

Post by pornel »

platinumrad wrote: post #2

There are sometimes good reasons, usually related to features although sometimes related to performance, to prefer newer utilities like ripgrep over older ones like grep. Implementation language is not one of them.

All things being equal, implementation language shouldn't matter. But they aren't equal — different languages have different trade-offs and this affects programs they produce.

A fantastic `ls` implementation in Java would not be very practical. OTOH it's not an accident that Rusty replacements of these programs tend to be multi-threaded, because that's a thing Rust encourages and makes practical.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#43

Post by kohtatsu »

burfog wrote: post #8

From the ls replacement: "Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?" Uh, because squinting at blue-on-black text is much more difficult. Human eyes focus best at yellow-green, they see that as brightest, and they don't even have long-wavelength (blue) receptors in the fovea. I also looked at the alternatives to ps, top, cat, find, and du. My overall feeling is that these are really not like UNIX tools at…

sd(1) looks super cute.

https://github.com/chmln/sd

Very UNIX-y imo.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#45

Post by littlestymaar »

dragonsh wrote: post #41
littlestymaar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who don't like Rust like to point at Zig as an alternative, but as long as it's developed by a single guy and there's a lot of breaking changes at each release, it isn't really an option. At this point this could still change a lot and even add a borrow checker! (Rust didn't start with it, it used to have a GC back in the 0.* releases)

Yes it’s started by one man like Go by Dennis and Python by Guido and many more, only time will tell.

Only time will tell if your one-persone startup in your garage is going to kill Facebook eventually. But until it grows, it's a bit awkward to compare them.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#46

Post by rcxdude »

dragonsh wrote: post #30
littlestymaar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“marketing” is probably not the right word since there is no money backing it, and it's not a concerted effort either. “Fashion” would fit better I think. Rust has long been something intellectually interesting (solving memory issues found in C and C++, while keeping their low level and with equal performance is quite a feat), but it recently started to become affordable to use (libraries are maturing, there's tons o…

Rust solve memory issues of C/C++ at the cost of simplicity and with convoluted, complicated syntax. It will bring in new class of bugs when it becomes popular enough and when large parts of Firefox are rewritten in it. I am not sure why some programmers think, complex and convoluted the syntax, the better the language, especially taking rust as an example. Go has been successful in it’s niche as systems programming…

>It will bring in new class of bugs when it becomes popular enough and when large parts of Firefox are rewritten in it.

It's quite hard to see how these bugs will come from 'the syntax is complicated'. For one, the syntax is simpler than C++, and secondly, complex syntax is not necessarily a cause of bugs: Rust is not prone to errors in syntax becoming runtime bugs.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#47

Post by rcxdude »

burfog wrote: post #8

From the ls replacement: "Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?" Uh, because squinting at blue-on-black text is much more difficult. Human eyes focus best at yellow-green, they see that as brightest, and they don't even have long-wavelength (blue) receptors in the fovea. I also looked at the alternatives to ps, top, cat, find, and du. My overall feeling is that these are really not like UNIX tools at…

Well, this is basically the direction that GNU tools have been growing in for a while. And I think that's because ultimately these are tools with a human interface first, script interface second (and UNIX has always been mediocre at the script interface part: shell scripts are just bad programming languages).

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#48

Post by burfog »

nine_k wrote: post #35
burfog wrote: post #8

From the ls replacement: "Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?" Uh, because squinting at blue-on-black text is much more difficult. Human eyes focus best at yellow-green, they see that as brightest, and they don't even have long-wavelength (blue) receptors in the fovea. I also looked at the alternatives to ps, top, cat, find, and du. My overall feeling is that these are really not like UNIX tools at…

I think you made a typo; long-wavelength is red, and blue is short wavelength.

Yes. It's the short-wavelength receptors that are missing from the fovea. Informally, they are blue receptors, but the ranges overlap in a much more complicated way.

Terrible color combinations for text: blue/black, magenta/red, cyan/green, white/yellow.

The example uses blue/black.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#49

Post by dragonsh »

littlestymaar wrote: post #45
dragonsh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it’s started by one man like Go by Dennis and Python by Guido and many more, only time will tell.

Only time will tell if your one-persone startup in your garage is going to kill Facebook eventually. But until it grows, it's a bit awkward to compare them.

Correct it's bit awkward given Rust is in the same league as Zig when compared wit Go language, which is widely adopted and used in many core network infrastructure systems programming, powering Internet today. So if Rust can come close to Go language, same is the case for zig language against Rust.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#50

Post by pdimitar »

monocasa wrote: post #34
dragonsh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go even with GC is very popular as systems programming language in its niche of writing network servers, can’t say the same about Rust except it’s in Fashion on HN, because it looks complex and difficult for programmers. Rust rely on underlying C library for doing anything useful today and still hasn’t demonstrated any real large benefits. Zig helps programmer with tools to write memory safe programs by not shooting…

> Go even with GC is very popular as systems programming language in its niche of writing network servers Nine times out of ten a network server isn't systems programming. And even at google, golang is starting to be banned for real systems use by some projects. > Rust rely on underlying C library for doing anything useful today Go relies on libraries everywhere except Linux too, because that's where the stable bound…

> * And even at google, golang is starting to be banned for real systems use by some projects.*

Quite curious. Got a source? Would like to read more on that.

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