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I’ve been playing around with rust since it came out but only recently did I decide to use it for a part of a project. It’s a very pleasant language. I didn’t f

I’ve been playing around with rust since it came out but only recently did I decide to use it for a part of a project. It’s a very pleasant language. I didn’t fight the borrow checker much (maybe due to prior experience). The language is nuts. It’s true what they say cargo is even better than the language, it’s just so easy to add packages to your project or to split your project into packages. Cargo is an amazing investment as this will help people write non duplicated code. Like how many string implementations are there across c code bases. Each c project has so much code that’s the most boring, repetitive shit you can imagine. Cargo let’s you concentrate on writing your code without hassle. I have experience with a lot of package managers, gems, go, cocoapods, sbt, cabal, pip, spm, npm, you name it but cargo is on a different plane of existence. Cargo makes the whole internet your standard library. I also like cargo workspaces. Modern development needs a workflow where you pull in a dependency, and work on it in tandem with your code. Achieving a good workflow for this is surprisingly hard.

lioeters 8y ago
> Modern development needs a workflow where you pull in a dependency, and work on it in tandem with your code. Achieving a good workflow for this is surprisingly hard. Well put! I've struggled with this exact situation, and although I figured out a setup that works for me, it's still not ideal. In my experience, npm the package manager doesn't enable such workflows reliably (yet).
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  I agree. A lot of times I end up just pushing dependencies to github and pulling from github in the main codebase.
c-smile 8y ago
> write non duplicated code ... Like how many string implementations are there across c code bases. In one of projects I needed foo::string that can share data with foo::variant without copying the data each time. So foo::string was implemented as a COW string - smart pointer for foo::string_data. std::string simply does not work in such requirements. So I am not sure I understand how cargo will help in this case. Either Cargo source repository will contain implementations of any possible permutation of requirements of strings or people will just use standard std::string. The only feature that I need in C/C++ is unified ability to include libraries in code: #define PNG_APNG_REQUIRED #include source "libs/png/png-amalgamated.c" I am perfectly fine with downloading png.tar.gz manually and putting it in place where I need it. In any case decision to include library to a product requires quite a lot of reasonings and architectural investigations. For typical web front-end projects NPM or Cargo probably make sense. But for, say, NodeJs or Cargo itself they should not use any such automatic downloader.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  Your problem isn't hard to solve in Rust. Reasoning about allocations is a foundational idea of Rust and is solved using lifetimes. Basically, lifetimes are allocators as a first-class language construct. You can reason about what happens if values are stack or heap allocated and specialize your code based on that. Lifetimes are definitely an advanced feature and I think you can do some crazy optimizations with them. But your use case is not hard to implement. If you show me the C++, I'll show you how to achieve the same semantics. Cargo helps because Rust lets you build cleaner abstractions and abstractions that compose nicer. So integration is super easy. > For typical web front-end projects NPM or Cargo probably make sense. I might misunderstand your sentence, but neither Rust nor cargo are for front-end?
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    npm is used a lot for front end code, incidentally. Node is an environment for a lot of build tooling.

lioeters 8y ago

> Modern development needs a workflow where you pull in a dependency, and work on it in tandem with your code. Achieving a good workflow for this is surprisingly hard. Well put! I've struggled with this exact situation, and although I figured out a setup that works for me, it's still not ideal. In my experience, npm the package manager doesn't enable such workflows reliably (yet).

adamnemecek 8y ago
I agree. A lot of times I end up just pushing dependencies to github and pulling from github in the main codebase.

c-smile 8y ago

> write non duplicated code ... Like how many string implementations are there across c code bases. In one of projects I needed foo::string that can share data with foo::variant without copying the data each time. So foo::string was implemented as a COW string - smart pointer for foo::string_data. std::string simply does not work in such requirements. So I am not sure I understand how cargo will help in this case. Either Cargo source repository will contain implementations of any possible permutation of requirements of strings or people will just use standard std::string. The only feature that I need in C/C++ is unified ability to include libraries in code: #define PNG_APNG_REQUIRED #include source "libs/png/png-amalgamated.c" I am perfectly fine with downloading png.tar.gz manually and putting it in place where I need it. In any case decision to include library to a product requires quite a lot of reasonings and architectural investigations. For typical web front-end projects NPM or Cargo probably make sense. But for, say, NodeJs or Cargo itself they should not use any such automatic downloader.

adamnemecek 8y ago
Your problem isn't hard to solve in Rust. Reasoning about allocations is a foundational idea of Rust and is solved using lifetimes. Basically, lifetimes are allocators as a first-class language construct. You can reason about what happens if values are stack or heap allocated and specialize your code based on that. Lifetimes are definitely an advanced feature and I think you can do some crazy optimizations with them. But your use case is not hard to implement. If you show me the C++, I'll show you how to achieve the same semantics. Cargo helps because Rust lets you build cleaner abstractions and abstractions that compose nicer. So integration is super easy. > For typical web front-end projects NPM or Cargo probably make sense. I might misunderstand your sentence, but neither Rust nor cargo are for front-end?
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  npm is used a lot for front end code, incidentally. Node is an environment for a lot of build tooling.