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Cargo is strictly worse than any of the solutions for python. Doing even the simplest things seems to involve pulling down and compiling hundreds of dependencie

Cargo is strictly worse than any of the solutions for python. Doing even the simplest things seems to involve pulling down and compiling hundreds of dependencies.

big-green-man 2y ago
This is... Not a bad thing? Compiling your dependencies into your standalone executable is like butter, no dependency hell, no virtual environments or containers to avoid said hell. You release a program that has everything it needs to run, it's as good as it gets IMO.
- jacobgorm 2y ago
  The problem that the resulting program ends up too large for my users to download, because it depended on libtwoplustwo that in turn depended on libkitchensink.
  - big-green-man 2y ago
    The rust compiler does not include in your binary any unused code. Unless libtwoplustwo uses the entirety of libkitchensink, the latter is not entirely included in your binary. This is not true for python, or external libraries, or appimages, or docker containers.
    - jacobgorm 2y ago
      It seems to me one would have to solve the Halting Problem for that to be universally true.
      - big-green-man 2y ago
        Not quite, it is pretty trivial to check what external dependencies your program calls, and what those dependencies call and so forth. I'm sure you could write a program that has a dependency chain that requires the entire database of packages in cargo (and that would he an interesting experiment). A lot of modern programming languages evaluate what code is referenced in a working program and only include used code, and the compiler enforces writing your program in such a way that it doesn't have to go over infinite possibilities to check. Of course, you have to have the entire dependency to compile for each import (and so would your user if you only distribute source code) to reference the first problem you mentioned above, and I'm sure there are ways to trick the compiler into endlessly checking dependencies or evaluating references, probably using unsafe, but that's why the compiler won't let you compile with unassigned values and has ownership and scope, you have to write your program in such a way that the compiler can tell what code will be executed at runtime or it won't compile.
        jacobgorm 2y ago
        I program that is Turing complete cannot be reasoned about unless you can solve the Halting problem. So you cannot decide at compile time if a dependency that is imported is actually needed or not. In rust even the build-scripts are Turing-complete rust-programs, which makes this even harder.

Cargo is strictly worse than any of the solutions for python. Doing even the simplest things seems to involve pulling down and compiling hundreds of dependencies.

big-green-man 2y ago

This is... Not a bad thing? Compiling your dependencies into your standalone executable is like butter, no dependency hell, no virtual environments or containers to avoid said hell. You release a program that has everything it needs to run, it's as good as it gets IMO.

jacobgorm 2y ago
The problem that the resulting program ends up too large for my users to download, because it depended on libtwoplustwo that in turn depended on libkitchensink.
- big-green-man 2y ago
  The rust compiler does not include in your binary any unused code. Unless libtwoplustwo uses the entirety of libkitchensink, the latter is not entirely included in your binary. This is not true for python, or external libraries, or appimages, or docker containers.
  - jacobgorm 2y ago
    It seems to me one would have to solve the Halting Problem for that to be universally true.
    - big-green-man 2y ago
      Not quite, it is pretty trivial to check what external dependencies your program calls, and what those dependencies call and so forth. I'm sure you could write a program that has a dependency chain that requires the entire database of packages in cargo (and that would he an interesting experiment). A lot of modern programming languages evaluate what code is referenced in a working program and only include used code, and the compiler enforces writing your program in such a way that it doesn't have to go over infinite possibilities to check. Of course, you have to have the entire dependency to compile for each import (and so would your user if you only distribute source code) to reference the first problem you mentioned above, and I'm sure there are ways to trick the compiler into endlessly checking dependencies or evaluating references, probably using unsafe, but that's why the compiler won't let you compile with unassigned values and has ownership and scope, you have to write your program in such a way that the compiler can tell what code will be executed at runtime or it won't compile.
      - jacobgorm 2y ago
        I program that is Turing complete cannot be reasoned about unless you can solve the Halting problem. So you cannot decide at compile time if a dependency that is imported is actually needed or not. In rust even the build-scripts are Turing-complete rust-programs, which makes this even harder.