5 ms·

sounds like desperation to become relevant

by wdpk 4y ago

raphlinus 4y ago
I think you nailed it. I wake up each morning consumed with anxiety, thinking to myself, "how do I become relevant?" Clearly, having shipped advanced multilingual typesetting capabilities to billions of users didn't do it, nor developing high performance GPU rendering algorithms, nor having made a popular programming font. But posting a language comparison to Hacker News, that should put me on the map.
- rwaksmunski 4y ago
  Don't let the haters get to you. You and your work are awesome.
- pornel 4y ago
  Face it, your work will never be as immortal as autotools. You also bet on wrong languages. M4 is battle-tested, stood the test of time, and is much more stable.
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if he worked with autotools and m4 when working on, for example, an early version of GNOME's librsvg. Seriously, I was looking at a librsvg header file a couple months ago and was surprised to find his name.
  - raphlinus 4y ago
    You are right, and that is an excellent way to state my goals: I hope to create systems that have as much lasting impact as autotools.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      That said, for those of us that don't have the luxury of working only in Rust, the cargo monoculture is a problem. Or more precisely, as a result of that monoculture there is a single implementation of build.rs and it cannot interoperate with anything else. If cargo could optionally generate a build.ninja file or some JSON with the command it runs, it would be so much easier.
      - raphlinus 4y ago
        This is in fact one part of the post that was based on an unironic kernel of truth. I've wrestled with this more than most people. In particular I tried to fit cargo into the Fuchsia build system, with only partial success. That approach has been abandoned and Fuchsia now translates Cargo manifests into GN build rules, which seems to be the prevailing approach for polyglot builds, especially with Bazel. However, the experience when doing pure Rust is night and day compared with stuff like CMake. And even in a polyglot build, the Cargo manifest is a reasonably good starting point, as argued recently by matklad[1]. Obviously, build systems and package managers at large scale are very challenging to get right, otherwise we'd have a good solution by now. I personally think Bazel is a pretty good step in the right direction, but it's very clunky and awkward for smaller projects. I found Neil Mitchell's classification[2] useful. Cargo is best-in-class for the "small" and arguably "medium" cases, but starts showing its limitations beyond that. Bazel is the reverse, one of the few really workable choices for "huge" but not a great experience otherwise. [1]: https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-language.html https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-lang... [2]: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-build-systems.html https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-buil...
        bonzini 4y ago
        Do you have a pointer for the translation? As soon as you have a transitive dependency on libc or any other Rust binding to a C library that approach would seem to fail due to the presence of build.rs.
        raphlinus 4y ago
        Yes, the tool is cargo-gnaw. It does not evaluate build.rs files itself, but there is a process for evaluating them at the time the crate is vendored. https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/tools/cargo-gnaw/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/tools/carg...
        bonzini 4y ago
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Your work will never be as immortal as cockroaches and viruses either.
- camdenlock 4y ago
  Holy crap, imagine being this insecure.
  - raphlinus 4y ago
    Yeah, it's no walk in the park, let me tell you that.
  - oconnor663 4y ago
    One time someone left a comment on one of my videos that was like "I don't like the sound you make when you drink water." And now whenever I look back at that video, I remember that comment, every time. It's wild how the mind works.
    - winwhiz 4y ago
      I don't know what it is called I just know the sound it makes when it goes down a man's throat.
- wdpk 4y ago
  I thought a sense of humor and maybe a little bit of a thick skin would be required if you want to partake into April fools bashing. Who's taking oneself seriously now...

sounds like desperation to become relevant

by wdpk 4y ago

sounds like desperation to become relevant

I think you nailed it. I wake up each morning consumed with anxiety, thinking to myself, "how do I become relevant?" Clearly, having shipped advanced multilingual typesetting capabilities to billions of users didn't do it, nor developing high performance GPU rendering algorithms, nor having made a popular programming font. But posting a language comparison to Hacker News, that should put me on the map.

rwaksmunski 4y ago
Don't let the haters get to you. You and your work are awesome.
pornel 4y ago
Face it, your work will never be as immortal as autotools. You also bet on wrong languages. M4 is battle-tested, stood the test of time, and is much more stable.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if he worked with autotools and m4 when working on, for example, an early version of GNOME's librsvg. Seriously, I was looking at a librsvg header file a couple months ago and was surprised to find his name.
- raphlinus 4y ago
  You are right, and that is an excellent way to state my goals: I hope to create systems that have as much lasting impact as autotools.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    That said, for those of us that don't have the luxury of working only in Rust, the cargo monoculture is a problem. Or more precisely, as a result of that monoculture there is a single implementation of build.rs and it cannot interoperate with anything else. If cargo could optionally generate a build.ninja file or some JSON with the command it runs, it would be so much easier.
    - raphlinus 4y ago
      This is in fact one part of the post that was based on an unironic kernel of truth. I've wrestled with this more than most people. In particular I tried to fit cargo into the Fuchsia build system, with only partial success. That approach has been abandoned and Fuchsia now translates Cargo manifests into GN build rules, which seems to be the prevailing approach for polyglot builds, especially with Bazel. However, the experience when doing pure Rust is night and day compared with stuff like CMake. And even in a polyglot build, the Cargo manifest is a reasonably good starting point, as argued recently by matklad[1]. Obviously, build systems and package managers at large scale are very challenging to get right, otherwise we'd have a good solution by now. I personally think Bazel is a pretty good step in the right direction, but it's very clunky and awkward for smaller projects. I found Neil Mitchell's classification[2] useful. Cargo is best-in-class for the "small" and arguably "medium" cases, but starts showing its limitations beyond that. Bazel is the reverse, one of the few really workable choices for "huge" but not a great experience otherwise. [1]: https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-language.html https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-lang... [2]: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-build-systems.html https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-buil...
      - bonzini 4y ago
        Do you have a pointer for the translation? As soon as you have a transitive dependency on libc or any other Rust binding to a C library that approach would seem to fail due to the presence of build.rs.
        raphlinus 4y ago
        Yes, the tool is cargo-gnaw. It does not evaluate build.rs files itself, but there is a process for evaluating them at the time the crate is vendored. https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/tools/cargo-gnaw/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/tools/carg...
        bonzini 4y ago
- kazinator 4y ago
  Your work will never be as immortal as cockroaches and viruses either.
camdenlock 4y ago
Holy crap, imagine being this insecure.
- raphlinus 4y ago
  Yeah, it's no walk in the park, let me tell you that.
- oconnor663 4y ago
  One time someone left a comment on one of my videos that was like "I don't like the sound you make when you drink water." And now whenever I look back at that video, I remember that comment, every time. It's wild how the mind works.
  - winwhiz 4y ago
    I don't know what it is called I just know the sound it makes when it goes down a man's throat.
wdpk 4y ago
I thought a sense of humor and maybe a little bit of a thick skin would be required if you want to partake into April fools bashing. Who's taking oneself seriously now...