Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Yeah, I've given up trying to know all the libraries in my projects. I feel like the added development speed and code quality is just so good that not taking the risk of a supply chain attack is basically not an option.
I do try to primarily use libraries from the Rust team or from more widely known devs (and hope that they also do that), but most projects worth doing will need one or two specialty libraries where all bets and bus factors are off...
Fuck that. It's awesome! I want to have lazy initialized globals. It's that package. I want code to shorten my builder pattern I import that. I need a typed concurrent work steel queue. No problem.
I look at a c project. Everywhere custom macros to do the most basic shit. I want to parse an xml in c? Better use a sax Parser and put all the data into globals. Cryptography? Better implement that ourselves... Using a library would be too much of a hassle.
I find it especially weird that it's almost always labeled like something special if it's written in Rust, even though as the end user the only thing I know will be different is the compile time, as it usually takes around 10-20 times longer than if it would be written in c, with 500 dependencies being pulled and recompiled every time. Which means if tests fail, even though the app works fine, and I had that happen twice in Rust, it will take three tries or so until I manage to fully remove the test section from the pkgbuild, resulting in an hour loss for just installing something that could've taken 5 minutes.
> Decide to create a very basic GUI app in Rust, as everyone is saying it's a great language for it
> First compilation takes over 15 minutes to download and compile 100 libraries
> Debug files take up 2GB of storage
> Output binary file comes out massive for no reason
> "Yeah you're supposed to write a few lines to optimize for size in your release profile"
> Compiling now takes 30 minutes instead
Reimplements in C
Compiles in 5 Minutes (you accidentally did it on the RPi Zero W, on a PC it's done in 30 secs)
Reimplements in C
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Reimplements in C
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
change code so it no longer segfaults
still is UB, has arbitrary code execution vulnerability
everybody dies
But you died faster, that's not to be underestimated
You seem to be a rather specific user, if the compile time is something you notice, let alone the only thing...
It's just weirdly noticeable when one rust program with ~150 lines of code, designed to connect to a specific device and send commands according to the intensity of music, takes longer to compile than updating a typical Arch testing setup after a month without maintenance, including the (non Rust) AUR packages.
Well, I'm not here to claim that Rust's compile times aren't comparatively long, especially for non-incremental builds. It's a trade-off that was chosen to not need a runtime environment, nor be as simplistic/footgun as C.
What I'm saying is that this trade-off was chosen and continues to be popular, because the vast majority of users will never notice (nor will programmers really, as they have incremental builds).
Maybe you can download the fully built package from somewhere? Maybe Arch can package it in the proper repos?
mf conveniently forgetting about incremental compilation
Every time I see a project decide to use rust I groan knowing my build/packaging time is about to skyrocket. Case in point, the Python cryptography project.
And given cryptography's importance in the Python ecosystem what used to be an easy pip install of a package now almost always going to include is an enormous and horribly slow rust build environment.
Seeing a rust libraryjust makes me sad now 😭
I've never used Rust, but this definitely reminds me of my days running Slackware on my computers.
Oh, hey, I'd like to run this new package. Great. I'll need this dependency...and that one...and the one over there....
I know it now has dependency management, but I just couldn't do it any more. I was tired of worrying about what was going to break. I started with Slackware in the 3.x days, too.
I switched my server to Debian, and I feel like I never have to worry about it any more. Laptop and desktop are both Kubuntu, but they're going to go to Debian at some point in the near future.
Sounds like JavaScript
Laravel moment
I often find myself wishing Cargo had a feature that would warn me if different dependencies I used tried to pull in both openssl and rustls. Happened way too many times.
You could use cargo-deny for that: https://embarkstudios.github.io/cargo-deny/checks/bans/index.html#use-case---denying-specific-crates
You'd need to remember to run it, though. Either in CI/CD or as a pre-commit hook or personally, I like to just have a script which also runs unit tests and Clippy, so that it's useful enough that I run it myself.
Grep cargo.lock on pre-commit?