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> throw away all of the community and things that they've built so far. The sad truth is probably, that Rusts complexity is just a mirror of the entire industr

by j-pb 5y ago

> throw away all of the community and things that they've built so far. The sad truth is probably, that Rusts complexity is just a mirror of the entire industry. If we, as a profession, placed a lot of value onto tiny, simple, yet well thought out (and therefore powerful) things, rewriting everything once a year wouldn't be as much of a problem. No codebase would have more than 5kLOCs, Browsers would only do layouts with the thing we build after learning from Flexbox, Grid, and Column, and Rusts language spec would fit into a white-paper like Scheme did. At least Rusts borrow checker uses such a tiny, well thought out, piece of code with its datafrog engine.

steveklabnik 5y ago
It sounds like you'd like the work Alan Kay was doing with VPRI, though in my understanding that is over now.
- j-pb 5y ago
  Definitely! Although I'm not sure if Morphic[1] is the way forward for UX on the web, despite it only being 10kloc. XD [Anybody stumbling upon this comment, and wondering what Alan Kay is/was up to, this might be a good philosophical starter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc] 1. https://lively-kernel.org https://lively-kernel.org
mwcampbell 5y ago
The problem with such a focus on smallness and simplicity, particularly at higher layers of the stack, is that it requires throwing out lots of people's must-have features. For me and my blind friends, that feature is a screen reader. For someone else, it's right-to-left or bidirectional text rendering (hello TrojanSource). For someone else, it's complex writing systems or support for Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane. And so on. I doubt that any UI framework that fits in 5000 lines of code or less would support all these things. Sure, some of the complexity in the industry can be eliminated, but some is truly necessary. One good thing about Rust mirroring the complexity of the industry is that at least one Rust GUI toolkit, Druid, is taking accessibility and internationalization seriously. (Disclosure: the team at Google that's funding a lot of the work on Druid is also funding me to work on accessibility.)

by j-pb 5y ago

steveklabnik 5y ago

It sounds like you'd like the work Alan Kay was doing with VPRI, though in my understanding that is over now.

j-pb 5y ago
Definitely! Although I'm not sure if Morphic[1] is the way forward for UX on the web, despite it only being 10kloc. XD [Anybody stumbling upon this comment, and wondering what Alan Kay is/was up to, this might be a good philosophical starter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc] 1. https://lively-kernel.org https://lively-kernel.org

mwcampbell 5y ago

The problem with such a focus on smallness and simplicity, particularly at higher layers of the stack, is that it requires throwing out lots of people's must-have features. For me and my blind friends, that feature is a screen reader. For someone else, it's right-to-left or bidirectional text rendering (hello TrojanSource). For someone else, it's complex writing systems or support for Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane. And so on. I doubt that any UI framework that fits in 5000 lines of code or less would support all these things. Sure, some of the complexity in the industry can be eliminated, but some is truly necessary. One good thing about Rust mirroring the complexity of the industry is that at least one Rust GUI toolkit, Druid, is taking accessibility and internationalization seriously. (Disclosure: the team at Google that's funding a lot of the work on Druid is also funding me to work on accessibility.)