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It's unfortunate that Rust is so tied to cargo, and unfortunate that cargo insists on allowing multiple versions of a dependency. If you point out that cargo is

It's unfortunate that Rust is so tied to cargo, and unfortunate that cargo insists on allowing multiple versions of a dependency. If you point out that cargo is poorly designed everyone just yells and you and says you don't understand.

damnyou 7y ago
Only incompatible versions though — Rust dedups dependencies up to semver compatibility. I think that's the right balance. clap 3 is and should be treated as a totally different package from clap 2.
- vmchale 7y ago
  It's not as bad as cabal back in the day. Nonetheless I have run into the diamond dependency problem in practice. Their solution is unprincipled and there's no way to turn off the default behavior.
  - damnyou 7y ago
    Do you mean passing a struct from e.g. clap 2 into clap 3? Yeah that won't work directly, nor should it in my opinion. If it is frequently required, projects can and should provide a compatibility layer which does any necessary conversions.
    - vmchale 7y ago
      > Do you mean passing a struct from e.g. clap 2 into clap 3? Yeah that won't work directly, nor should it in my opinion. I agree! But it shouldn't fail at compile time with a vexing error message. It should fail to resolve dependencies when calculating a build plan.
      - damnyou 7y ago
        That would seem to completely disallow any compatibility layers, which seems like a bad outcome. Unless you had some sort of solution in mind for that? I agree that the error message sucks, for what it's worth.
nieksand 7y ago
Can you elaborate on the design flaws that you perceive in Cargo?
- umanwizard 7y ago
  The biggest flaw is that it makes taking new dependencies easy. I would prefer that it be hard, like in C++, so people think before doing it. The second biggest flaw is that it couples package management to a programming language, despite those being almost completely unrelated concerns.
  - vmchale 7y ago
    > The second biggest flaw is that it couples package management to a programming language, despite those being almost completely unrelated concerns. Yes it's frustrating. I wish it was more decoupled, maybe with package standards like Haskell tried to do with Cabal. It makes it hard to use Rust as a drop-in replacement for C. I can add a few C files to a Haskell project without much problem, but most rust code goes via cargo.

damnyou 7y ago

Only incompatible versions though — Rust dedups dependencies up to semver compatibility. I think that's the right balance. clap 3 is and should be treated as a totally different package from clap 2.

vmchale 7y ago
It's not as bad as cabal back in the day. Nonetheless I have run into the diamond dependency problem in practice. Their solution is unprincipled and there's no way to turn off the default behavior.
- damnyou 7y ago
  Do you mean passing a struct from e.g. clap 2 into clap 3? Yeah that won't work directly, nor should it in my opinion. If it is frequently required, projects can and should provide a compatibility layer which does any necessary conversions.
  - vmchale 7y ago
    > Do you mean passing a struct from e.g. clap 2 into clap 3? Yeah that won't work directly, nor should it in my opinion. I agree! But it shouldn't fail at compile time with a vexing error message. It should fail to resolve dependencies when calculating a build plan.
    - damnyou 7y ago
      That would seem to completely disallow any compatibility layers, which seems like a bad outcome. Unless you had some sort of solution in mind for that? I agree that the error message sucks, for what it's worth.

nieksand 7y ago

Can you elaborate on the design flaws that you perceive in Cargo?

umanwizard 7y ago
The biggest flaw is that it makes taking new dependencies easy. I would prefer that it be hard, like in C++, so people think before doing it. The second biggest flaw is that it couples package management to a programming language, despite those being almost completely unrelated concerns.
- vmchale 7y ago
  > The second biggest flaw is that it couples package management to a programming language, despite those being almost completely unrelated concerns. Yes it's frustrating. I wish it was more decoupled, maybe with package standards like Haskell tried to do with Cabal. It makes it hard to use Rust as a drop-in replacement for C. I can add a few C files to a Haskell project without much problem, but most rust code goes via cargo.