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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#71
post #65

Syncthing, by a mile. As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.

I use syncthing and appreciate that it exists. It's way too easy to accidentally all your data, though!

I've been dragging my feet migrating a hard drive from my old desktop to my new one for 1.5 years. This past weekend I finally got motivated to power the old one up and wait for syncthing to give positive indication that it's in sync with my server. The reason that was even a concern of mine is that the last time I used that desktop, I spent a whole weekend cleaning up about 200 GB of renamed and duplicated "sync conflict" files that syncthing created and then synced to my server when I previously migrated hard drives. I wasn't sure if all the fixes had made it to the server yet. That required writing my own tooling to positively confirm every duplicate was bitwise identical before deleting one or the other.

The official documentation suggests I remove syncthing's metadata from the drive and then add it again on the new computer, and let it re-sync. It's a good way to check for bit-rot I guess. At least the documentation these days suggests marking one instance as read-only.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#73
post #65

Syncthing, by a mile. As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.

i feel it's a great example of software that doesn't get in your way.

I would've love to write about how awesome it is but came across this wonderful essay regarding the same titled _"Computers as I used to love them"_ [0]. Highly checking it out.

[0] : https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#76
The Tokio async stack for Rust (https://tokio.rs).

They did a really nice job of building thin layers up the stack from byte buffers (bytes), to async-friendly logging (tracing), basic IO (mio), async runtime (tokio), generic request/response services (tower), HTTP (hyper), and a web framework (axum).

Each of the layers are useful independent of the other layers above, and every one is has a thoughtfully designed, pragmatic interface.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#78
Standard Notes.

Simple. Free. Open Source. E2E encryption. Basically, No frills.

Their idea is to make software not with most features but the one that stays until the next century.

They have a great blog on this philosophy. https://standardnotes.com/longevity

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#79

The Tokio async stack for Rust ( https://tokio.rs ). They did a really nice job of building thin layers up the stack from byte buffers (bytes), to async-friendly logging (tracing), basic IO (mio), async runtime (tokio), generic request/response services (tower), HTTP (hyper), and a web framework (axum). Each of the layers are useful independent of the other layers above, and every one is has a thoughtfully designed,…

I believe I read that Tokio was a "hacky" way to add async to Rust - similar to the solution in the Python space... - is this not the case?
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