Rust Programs Every Linux User Should Know About

[thmm]

many older programs are being rewritten in Rust, including a lot of the standard shell utilities. Today, I wanted to briefly mention seven Rust programs that I have installed that I think you should know about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQa9mveTSV4

[mbozzi]

"Written in Rust" is not a feature.
Our field doesn't benefit from senseless hype.

[deleted account xyzzy]

"Rust Programs Every Linux User Should Know About"

Yeah, m'ok, whatever........

[helios]

I find it pretty astounding how many people are willing to jump on board such an immature language. To quote myself:

>So, Linus Torvalds, who rejected calls for code written in C++ to be accepted
>into the Linux kernel for decades because he thought that the extra features it
>provides were not worth the added complexity it would bring, has decided to
>allow Rust support in Linux because... he suddenly got infected with brain
>worms that made him want to be a crowd-following blogger writing commentary for
>internet upvotes?
>And not because he thinks Rust might be able to solve actual problems in kernel
>development?
>I want whatever drugs you're taking.

To be completely honest, I would wager it was more a matter of ego than anything rational. C++ kept improving over time and he knew that, but rather than revise his position and admit to an error, he stubbornly persisted until Rust came along, and that gave him an out. "Well, C++ is too shitty; but Rust, a language that has not been around for even a decade, that's was I want to add support for in the kernel". Rust has pretty much all the failings he accused C++ of having, it just has memory safety as an additional benefit.

[kbw]

Has Rust stabilized yet? When I looked sometime ago, it seemed to be still evolving and tied to Firefox releases.

[helios]

It's still actively evolving, and the nightly releases break code routinely. Yet I've still seen projects depend on them.

[deleted account xyzzy]

Heh, nightly releases break code routinely.....

Sounds like earlier versions of MSVC.....code that worked a week previously suddenly is now reported as being chock full of errors.

[seeplus]

Rust - A fungal disease of plants (or just a fungus)...

[thmm]

I don't know why Rust is getting more and more popular. Maybe because Google, MS and Mozilla advocate it?
I don't like the syntax of it at all, seems even more complicated than C++.

[thmm]

Rust has pretty much all the failings he accused C++ of having, it just has memory safety as an additional benefit.

@helios,
he gives 5 reasons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzK2maO89uw

[helios]

Tooling

What a joke. I've been writing Rust for weeks in Notepad++ because rust-analyze in VS Code can't cope with the project. It passes the 2 GB allocation mark and eventually just crashes. Wake me up when there's a ReSharper equivalent for Rust.

And yeah, Cargo is great. I love how a few weeks ago I wanted to swap a dependency for one with a modification I had made, and doing that caused a cascade effect where I had to modify more and more dependencies in order to make them point to the correct repository. (The repository I was modifying contained multiple modules, some of which depended on modules on different repositories that depended on modules on the original repository.)
I love tools that make my job more difficult, tedious, and time-consuming. And yes, it's this way because Cargo exists. A C/++ project wouldn't have broken up the codebase into (without exaggeration) 1200 build-system-level modules, because they would've known what a pain it is to gather everything together later.

[zapshe]

I wanted to see the fuss, went to an online tutorial to see someone code in Rust, saw the syntax, immediately exited the tutorial and never thought about Rust again.