𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2022年8月26日

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  • No, but just for you I spent time today extracting a list of ~250 packages installed from source on my computer, and tomorrow, I’m going to clean re-install all of them, timed, and post the results.

    There’s a mix of languages in there, and many packages have multiple language dependencies, but I’m going by the “Make Deps” package requirements and will post them.

    There will probably be too many variables for a clean comparison, but I know I have things like multiple CSV and json CLI toolkits in different languages installed, so some extrapolations should be possible.

    C is hard, because a lot of packages that must depend on gcc don’t include it in the make dependencies; they must assume everyone has at least one C compiler installed. A couple of packages explicitly depend on clang, so I’ll have that at least.








  • Granted, everyone is different. The cognitive load of Rust has been widely written about, though, so I don’t think I’m am outlier.

    Regardless, it’s not like either of us have any pull in the kernel (and probably never will). I fear for the day we let AI start writing kernel code…

    Absolutely never, in my case. This isn’t what concerns me, though. If Rust is harder than C, then fewer people are going to attempt it. If it takes several hours to compile the kernel on an average desktop computer, even fewer are going to be willing to contribute, and almost nobody who isn’t creating a distribution is ever going to even try to compile their own kernel. It may even dissuade people from trying to start new distributions.

    If, if, if. Maybe it seems as if I’m fear-mongering, but as I’ve commented elsewhere, I noticed that when looking for tools in AUR, I’ve started filtering out anything written in Rust unless it’s a -bin. It’s because at some point I noticed that the majority of the time spent upgrading software on my computer was spent compiling Rust packages. Like, I’d start an update, and every time I checked, it’d be in the middle of compiling Rust. And it isn’t because I’m using a lot of Rust software. It has had a noticeable negative impact on the amount of time my computer spends with the CPU pegged upgrading. God forgive me, I’ve actually chosen Node-based solutions over Rust ones just because there was no -bin for the Rust package.

    I don’t know if this is the same type of “cancer” in the vitriolic Kernel ML email that led to the second-to-last firestorm, but this is how I’ve started to feel about Rust - if there’s a bin, great! But no source-based packages, because then updating my desktop starts to become a half-day journey. I’m almost to the point of actively going in and replacing the source-based Rust tools with anything else, because it’s turning updating my system into a day-long project.

    Haskell is already in this corner. Between the disk space and glacial ghc compile times, I will not install anything Haskell unless it’s pre-compiled. And that’s me having once spent a year in a job writing Haskell - I like the language, but it’s like programming in the 70’s: you write out your code, submit it as a job, and then go do something else for a day. Rust is quickly joining it there, along with Electron apps, which are in the corner for an entirely different reason.





  • You’re throwing the baby out with the bath water with the reductio ad absurdum argument. Rust may very well be less secure than Ada - if so, then does that make it not good enough?

    I say it’s not worth trading some improvement in safety for vastly longer compile times and a more cognitively complex - harder - language, which increases the barrier of entry for contributors. If the trade were more safety than C, even if not as good as Rust, but improved compile times and a reasonable comprehensibility for non-experts in the language, that’s a reasonable trade.

    I have never written a line of code in Zig, but I can read it and derive a pretty good idea of what the syntax means without a lot of effort. The same cannot be said for Rust.

    I guess it doesn’t matter, because apparently software developers will all be replaced by AI pretty soon.