The section on comp time is written in a way which makes you think that zig invented the concept. It slightly irritated the lisper in me...
Great article apart from that.
Rewriting Rust
41–50 of 410 posts
Re: Rewriting Rust
#42I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate. At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread acr…
The fact is that dependency jungle is the prevalent way to get shit done these days. The best the runtime can do is embrace it, make it as performant and safe as possible and try to support minimum-dependency projects by having a broad std library. Also I am no expert, but I think file-watchers are definitely not simple at all, especially if they are multi-platform.
That's the usual response I get when I bring this issue up. "file watching is actually very complicated" or "if you avoided deps, you'd just reimplement millions of loc yourself.
Forgive me if I'm making a very bold claim, but I think cross-platform file watching should not require this much code. It's 32x larger than the Linux memory management subsystem.
Re: Rewriting Rust
#43>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…
I don’t know. But Rust FUD is at a stable high level. (Not referring to the article btw.)
Re: Rewriting Rust
#44I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate. At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread acr…
This is the main reason we have banned Rust across my Org. Every third party library needs to be audited before being introduced as a vendored dependency which
is not easy to do with the bloated dependency chains that Cargo promotes.
Re: Rewriting Rust
#45I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate. At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread acr…
Maybe they can learn from the Javascript folks, I heard they're very good at this.
Yes, unironically they’re now.
Node has improved greatly in last two years. They always had native JSON support. Now have native test runner, watch, fetch, working on permission system à la deno, added WebSockets and working on native SQLite driver. All of this makes it a really attractive platform for prototyping which scales from hello world without any dependencies to production.
Good luck experimenting with Rust without pulling half the internet with it.
E: and they’re working on native TS support
Re: Rewriting Rust
#46I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate. At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread acr…
What do you propose? To include it as part of std? Are you insane? That would bloat your binaries! (Still don’t understand how the smart compiler isn’t smart enough to remove dead code) And imagine if there’s an update that makes cargo-watch not BlAzInGlY fAsT™ but uLtRa BlAzInGlY fAsT™? /s
How does Go compare?
I'm curious as I don't know Go but it often gets mentioned here on HN as very lightweight.
(A quick googling finds https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=watch which makes me think that it's not any different?)
Re: Rewriting Rust
#47I stopped reading at "Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way."
That phone couldn't even send MMS.... You had to jailbreak it to be able to do normal stuff that the phones could do for ages back then.
Re: Rewriting Rust
#48Re: Rewriting Rust
#49I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate. At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread acr…
Maybe they can learn from the Javascript folks, I heard they're very good at this.
No, they are the worst perpetrators re dependency hell.
Re: Rewriting Rust
#50One of the things that hit me when I was picking up Rust was that I felt like it had every imaginable feature one could think of - I dont know if Rust team said no to anything (yes I know they obviously must’ve done) - and yet people wanted more and more (some justifiably, others less so) as the language “felt” incomplete or that the features thatd be used by 2% of devs are totally necessary in the language that is “understood” by 1% of developer populace. I’m not saying the author is wrong here, just pointing out how a complex language somehow needs to be even more complicated. Spoiler: it doesn’t. Zig is simpler, arguably faster, with much less drama in the community. I wish more funding went to Zig.