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Common *nix commands written in Rust

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Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#51

Post by pdimitar »

dragonsh wrote: post #49
littlestymaar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> * Go language, which is widely adopted and used in many core network infrastructure systems programming, powering Internet today.*

Is there a place where I can read more on this?

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#52

Post by pdimitar »

platinumrad wrote: post #17
infraredcabbage wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. If a program is written in Python, and becomes popular, it is usually a matter of time before it gets rewritten in, and replaced by an implementation in a faster language. There are fast implementations (C) and there are somewhat safe implementations (Python, Java, ...). If I were to place Rust in this hierarcy - it is both fast AND safe, and there's rarely a good reason to replace it, so you've softwa…

So why not write "fast and safe implementations of popular command line utilities" rather than focusing on the implementation language? If there were a safe and fast implementation of, for example, find in Ada why should it be excluded from this list?

Writing fast and safe implementations of popular CLI utilities is already happening.

There's also some advocacy involved which many people obviously find distasteful. To me it's a bonus though: tell me why your tech choice makes a difference, I'll check and maybe learn it.

Anything wrong what that?

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#53

Post by dragonsh »

pdimitar wrote: post #51
dragonsh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> * Go language, which is widely adopted and used in many core network infrastructure systems programming, powering Internet today.* Is there a place where I can read more on this?

Look at any modern container orchestration framework most are written in golang (including kubernetes), I see many SDN control plans and data plane software written in golang. You can find cockroachdb, raft etc and many more. Rust is just a fringe language at present in fashion on HN, may be zig might replace it as fashion language one day unless there is some critical system are using it like for C, C++, Python or go.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#54

Post by pdimitar »

platinumrad wrote: post #7
ggm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the language is strongly typed and reduces opportunistic threats of mis-application or unexpected data, I'd consider that an upside. If the compiler targets multi-cores and the language helps express implicit parallelism or asynchronous code possibilities which map to multi core, better than the original language, then thats net beneficial too. If the language encourages coding patterns which are extensible or re-…

Okay, so why not say "safer utilities" or "more performant utilities" rather than focusing on the implementation language? If I'm an end user of a safe and performant utility why should I care if it's written in Rust, Go, or OCaml?

But why do you care when it's said that it's written in language X? Does that ruin the story for you? And the potential usefulness of the tool?

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#55

Post by pdimitar »

harikb wrote: post #22

What I would like to see is something like Hadoop, Kafka, Spark rewritten in Rust. Something that will fundamentally change the landscape. Rewriting these Unix cli is only good learning experience

Maybe, but consider that security vulnerabilities have been found in SSH and `sudo` / `su`, several times the last few years (and they are not the only UNIX tools, it was just the noisiest news about such vulnerabilities).

Any new programming tech that avoids my SSHD letting anyone get in because of this or that is very welcome by me.

There's Sonic, which is a searching software, although not on the level of ElasticSearch. People are working hard to bring more safety to widely used technologies, every day, we just don't hear much about it.

Re: Common *nix commands written in Rust

#56

Post by monocasa »

pdimitar wrote: post #50
monocasa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/master...
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