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Rewriting Rust

josephg.com

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Re: Rewriting Rust

#51

Post by nullifidian »

dist1ll wrote: post #15

I 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…

Some amount of the risk from the "dependency jungle" situation could be alleviated by instituting "trusted" set of crates that are selected based on some popularity threshold, and with a rolling-release linux-distro-like stabilization chain, graduating from "testing" to "stable". If the Rust Foundation raised more money from the large companies, and hired devs to work as additional maintainers for these key crates, adding their signed-offs, it would be highly beneficial. That would have been a naturally evolving and changing equivalent to an extensive standard library. Mandating at least two maintainer sign offs for such critical set of crates would have been a good policy. Instead the large companies that use rust prefer to vet the crates on their own individually, duplicating the work the other companies do.

The fact that nothing has changed in the NPM and Python worlds indicates that market forces pressure the decision makers to prefer the more risky approach, which prioritizes growth and fast iteration.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#52

Post by csomar »

> You can't tell that something is borrowed until you try to compile your program. (Aside: I wish Rust IDEs made this state visible while programming!)

I am not sure what the OP is using, but with LSP I do get the error message in my editor (nvim) before any compiling (though am pretty sure some checking in happening in the background).

> Compile-time Capabilities

Not sure how this makes any sense when Rust compiles to multiple targets. Should all libraries become aware of all the "capabilities" out there. Also, this already can be implemented using features and keep things minimal.

> Comptime

I can't make sense of what the OP issue is here.

> Make if-let expressions support logical AND. Its so simple, so obvious, and so useful. This should work: if let Some(x) = some_var && some_expr { }

The example makes no sense.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#53

Post by lifthrasiir »

dist1ll wrote: post #33
conradludgate wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet most of those lines are from the generated windows api crates. They are notoriously monstrous

You're right, the windows crate alone contributes 2.2M. I wonder if there's a way to deal with this issue.

The exact size of the `windows` crate depends on feature flags, because parsing 2.2M lines of code is always going to be very expensive even when you immediately discard them.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#54

Post by arresin »

gyre007 wrote: post #50

One 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 “…

> I wish more funding went to Zig.

Unfortunately that attracts the worst types. And their crapness and damage potential is sometimes not realised until it’s way too late.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#55

Post by wiseowise »

willvarfar wrote: post #46
wiseowise wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

https://pkg.go.dev/std

They’re much better.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#56

Post by sznio »

feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>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 just returned to Rust after a few years, and the syntax is even more unreadable. Half of my code is just type signatures. I don't remember it being like that back in 2016 -- it seems like the convention changed and any crate you import returns the wildest types.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#57

Post by selfmodruntime »

dist1ll wrote: post #42
DanielHB wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh. The standard library is also a gigantic dependency written entirely by volunteers.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#58

Post by pjmlp »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #22
dist1ll wrote: post #15

I 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.

I think the interaction between both communities is exactly the reason of the current state.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#59

Post by TechDebtDevin »

dist1ll wrote: post #15

I 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…

You fuck around...

Re: Rewriting Rust

#60

Post by selfmodruntime »

armitron wrote: post #44
dist1ll wrote: post #15

I 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.

How do you solve this for other languages you use?
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