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Is it really the time, yet, to start advocating for rewrites in Rust? Worth considering for new projects, definitely. Using to write new components of existing

by ZoFreX 9y ago

Is it really the time, yet, to start advocating for rewrites in Rust? Worth considering for new projects, definitely. Using to write new components of existing projects, maybe. But rewriting existing work? I'm concerned if we start pushing that too much too early, the initial friction will burn people. You only get one first impression. For anyone who thinks "yes, now is the time" I have questions for you: Have you released and distributed software written in Rust? What's the install story like for end-users? Is it in a repository for a major OS (e.g. can I yum install it, or apt-get it) and if so which? As far as I can tell there's no major package manager accepting or even ready to accept programs written in Rust yet. Am I misinformed?

dikaiosune 9y ago
I believe Firefox as of recent versions requires a Rust compiler to be available, and that's a pretty bread-and-butter application to have in your distro's package repository.
- Paul-ish 9y ago
  You should only need a rust compiler to compile Firefox.
  - dikaiosune 9y ago
    Most distributions require that packages in the repositories are built with tools from the distribution.
steveklabnik 9y ago
> As far as I can tell there's no major package manager accepting or even ready to accept programs written in Rust yet. Am I misinformed? At least Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Gentoo have rustc and cargo in their repositories. Oh and Alpine, recently. FreeBSD (IIRC) has it in ports. In the not-too-distant future, there's a pretty important package that will require Rust: Firefox. HEAD already does today.
- ZoFreX 9y ago
  For Debian at least, cargo isn't even in stable yet AFAIK. And even then, having the compiler and package manager available is a step along the way, but insufficient. Anything non-trivial depends on libraries, which with C programs are typically also packages... which for my project means I need to create 73 Debian packages to distribute my software. That's a big hurdle.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    I thought it made the cutoff. I could be wrong. I was more worried about 1.15, which did get missed, ugh. Debian has made a tool, "debcargo", to automatically turn crates from crates.io into Debian packages, so it should be "just run this tool." I have not used it myself though.
    - ZoFreX 9y ago
      I think it's fair to say that anyone releasing software written in Rust on Debian right now has extra work to do, and is likely to be treading new ground.
      - steveklabnik 9y ago
        Totally! That's far different than "no major package manager accepting or even ready to accept programs written in Rust yet", though. Oh, I thought of something better than just the compiler: https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep#installation https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep#installation * homebrew * chocolatey * arch * gentoo * fedora * RHEL/CentOS * Nix All have at least one Rust program packaged :)
        ZoFreX 9y ago
        For RHEL/Centos/Fedora (the only ones there I would call "major") you have to enable a separate repo, which isn't really the same as being in the official repos.

by ZoFreX 9y ago

dikaiosune 9y ago

I believe Firefox as of recent versions requires a Rust compiler to be available, and that's a pretty bread-and-butter application to have in your distro's package repository.

Paul-ish 9y ago
You should only need a rust compiler to compile Firefox.
- dikaiosune 9y ago
  Most distributions require that packages in the repositories are built with tools from the distribution.

steveklabnik 9y ago

> As far as I can tell there's no major package manager accepting or even ready to accept programs written in Rust yet. Am I misinformed? At least Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Gentoo have rustc and cargo in their repositories. Oh and Alpine, recently. FreeBSD (IIRC) has it in ports. In the not-too-distant future, there's a pretty important package that will require Rust: Firefox. HEAD already does today.

ZoFreX 9y ago
For Debian at least, cargo isn't even in stable yet AFAIK. And even then, having the compiler and package manager available is a step along the way, but insufficient. Anything non-trivial depends on libraries, which with C programs are typically also packages... which for my project means I need to create 73 Debian packages to distribute my software. That's a big hurdle.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  I thought it made the cutoff. I could be wrong. I was more worried about 1.15, which did get missed, ugh. Debian has made a tool, "debcargo", to automatically turn crates from crates.io into Debian packages, so it should be "just run this tool." I have not used it myself though.
  - ZoFreX 9y ago
    I think it's fair to say that anyone releasing software written in Rust on Debian right now has extra work to do, and is likely to be treading new ground.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      Totally! That's far different than "no major package manager accepting or even ready to accept programs written in Rust yet", though. Oh, I thought of something better than just the compiler: https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep#installation https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep#installation * homebrew * chocolatey * arch * gentoo * fedora * RHEL/CentOS * Nix All have at least one Rust program packaged :)
      - ZoFreX 9y ago
        For RHEL/Centos/Fedora (the only ones there I would call "major") you have to enable a separate repo, which isn't really the same as being in the official repos.