• 248 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle














  • As someone that have worked in software for 30 years, and deplying complicated software, shared libraries is a misstake. You think you get the benefit of size and easy security upgrades, but due to deployment hell you end up using docker and now your deployment actually added a whole OS in size and you need to do security upgrades for this OS instead of just your application. I use rust for some software now, and I build it with musl, and is struck by how small things get in relation to the regular deployment, and it feels like magic that I no longer get glibc incompatibility issues.






  • Mindblowing features are basically, by definition, a result of bad language design. They blow your mind, since they are totally unexpected behaviours. They may still be cool, but they are unexpected and hence unintuitive.

    A language that are full of these is Perl. And one simple one is that you can take the string “AAAAA” and use addition on that, like “AAAAA”++ and you will get the result “AAAAB”. Cool you may think, but is it really? Addition is normally used to increase the value of a number, that is a completely different operation than modifying a String. The string “AAAAA” cannot be said to be greater or less than “AAAAB”, besides the very special case when we order it. But in general the name “John” is not considered to be higher/lower than “Mark”, they are just different. So, even if it is cool to manipulate strings by using addition/subtraction, it is still bad language design and very unintuitive. Also, since perl is so loosely typed, it may also cause very unexpected bugs.


  • Which is kind of surprising, since it basically just is a bunch of “I’m cannot understand why … is needed”, “I cannot learn…” and “I think that is ugly”. And since the OP is coming from TypeScript, and how the OPs understanding of programming, it is clear it is a junior web developer trying rust and failing. Nothing to see here… well, the OP clearly have some kind of grandios ego, thinking that the OPs inability to learn something, must be because it is bad (I mean, there is clearly no other possiblities)… but not even that is worth responding to. And don’t read this wrong, there is plenty to complain about with Rust, however, nothing of that is in OP which is basically just as insightful as a baby crying.


  • Ok, so we use different search engine so you didn’t find this particular hit. But, do you really claim that learning material is an issue here. And about my attitude, yes, I was a bit cranky. In general, you can ask any stupid question, heck I ask stupid questions all the time and they will be answered kindly. The rust community knows that lifetimes and stuff like that is complicated.

    However, I’m quite fed up with the attitude that it is someone elses obligation to spoon feed you with knowledge that exists right under the nose… and that is a very common attitude amongst the “For rust to succeed…” evangelists.
















  • Well… it is true that it doen’t have all these crates like Url included in the rust standard library, and hence it is not official. On the other hand Url was created by Mozilla to be used in Firefox, hence it is a quite competent crate that is very well maintained. And my guess is that the http crate may have the same kind of origins… but I’m not entirely sure about that.

    And even Java that includes quite a lot, still didn’t get a good Http library until very recent, until then you had to rely on some obscure library created by the unknown organization Apache… so…

    As a developer you always have to think about what libraries you use, and if you trust them… that goes for pretty much any language.



  • I learend it in the 90s, and was working on a large Perl codebase 2005 and a couple of years forward. And 20 years, it still started to feel dated, and 15 years ago it was just so out dated it hurt. So, starting to learn Perl 20 years ago would not have been great :) However, the things making Perl horrible, is pretty much threre in Python also with the addition of significant whitespace… so technically, going from Python to Perl might actually be a step in the right direction… Now, if you excuse me, I will hide behinde this huge rock for a while to let the incoming projectiles settle.