3 ms·

While it's undeniable the majority of things to come out of Rust are mostly superfluous rewrites of already solid projects (to your point about "now in Rust!" b

While it's undeniable the majority of things to come out of Rust are mostly superfluous rewrites of already solid projects (to your point about "now in Rust!" being the selling point) I think it's clear the author in this particular case was just looking into BEAM internals and started a fun project, so I don't think it applies here. In general, though, I think people ought to consider that if they are putting the language they wrote their project in in the marketing blurb for it (given a more serious project), maybe that indicates that the project itself is of little value to other people. "* Written in Rust" isn't a value proposition, it's just an implementation detail. Make real claims about zero crashes, zero leaks, something actually concrete and it can be scrutinized for real.

chc 7y ago
I think you're possibly making a faulty assumption here. You're right that "written in Rust" has no particular value to people who just want to use the thing, but that's not the only perspective people bring to open-source software. When somebody markets a project as "X written in Y," I generally assume they're marketing to people who might want to hack on it, and it is relevant from that perspective.
- Narishma 7y ago
  Even for users it can be valuable. For example, an Electron application gets an automatic pass from me.
merlinsbrain 7y ago
Written in X can definitely be a value proposition. If you are evaluating a tool/lib/etc that moves at a fast pace and your whole shop is extremely fluent in language X there's huge value add to being able to dive in without a context switch to understand how it works, especially when debugging harder problems. I don't think it applies to _this_ case where we're getting a VM that is _extremely_ battle-tested. Am I going to use a new OS instead of linux in production because someone tried to write an OS in zig? No. Will I congratulate the author for writing an OS in zig? Yes. If I am looking for a key-value store and two are equivalent in their purported features and stability, I will choose the one that is written in X that my shop is most fluent in.

chc 7y ago

I think you're possibly making a faulty assumption here. You're right that "written in Rust" has no particular value to people who just want to use the thing, but that's not the only perspective people bring to open-source software. When somebody markets a project as "X written in Y," I generally assume they're marketing to people who might want to hack on it, and it is relevant from that perspective.

Narishma 7y ago
Even for users it can be valuable. For example, an Electron application gets an automatic pass from me.

merlinsbrain 7y ago

Written in X can definitely be a value proposition. If you are evaluating a tool/lib/etc that moves at a fast pace and your whole shop is extremely fluent in language X there's huge value add to being able to dive in without a context switch to understand how it works, especially when debugging harder problems. I don't think it applies to _this_ case where we're getting a VM that is _extremely_ battle-tested. Am I going to use a new OS instead of linux in production because someone tried to write an OS in zig? No. Will I congratulate the author for writing an OS in zig? Yes. If I am looking for a key-value store and two are equivalent in their purported features and stability, I will choose the one that is written in X that my shop is most fluent in.