social.noyu.me

i think rust is great, easily my favourite programming language, and i agree with rust advocates on many things, but the sort of culture war-y way some people approach it gives me the ick, no matter which side you're on

@hikari The "if Rust does it a certain way, it must be right" attitude is infuriating and never more so than when you're actually trying to write Rust. It leads to really shallow thinking about the language.

What's really weird is I've stumbled into interacting with the actual Rust core devs and/or inventors a few times and they're all really nice, humble people who *don't act like this*. You ask about an odd decision & they either talk about complex tradeoffs or are like "oh that was an error"

@hikari Like, I want to be writing Rust, but there are a lot of things in it that come down to "this is a bad thing that was situationally necessary in order to achieve some other goal" and you want to figure out ways to cope with the bad thing and someone's coming along trying to convince you that the bad thing is Good Actually and it's just exhausting and unhelpful.

The only positive thing I can say on this front is I've also interacted with the Go community and they're even worse about this.

@mcc @hikari rust has sooooooo many tradeoffs in it where the root cause (there's no root cause) is that someone burned out trying to improve it and quit

@whitequark @mcc @hikari Rust is the product of a new programming language becoming much, much more feasible to create over decades. I'm hoping the same thing happening again will make it more possible for the space "near" Rust (using some of its ideas) to be more fully explored

@rf @whitequark @hikari Maybe, but also what I think about a lot is that one of the biggest barriers to making a new language is building a library ecosystem. Like the libraries are at least half of why I want to use Rust or TypeScript.

If I ever do a language project enough it's likely to be built on top of Rust in some way that reuses the ABI just so I don't ever have to learn or expect anyone else to learn a new library ecosystem again.

@mcc @rf @whitequark decoupling the ABI from C would solve so many problems

@mcc @rf @whitequark or rather decoupling ABI from languages generally. i want a universal cross-language native interface definition format

@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark I keep playing with writing down a syntax for it and then get bogged down when I realize the most interesting thing would be enums/ADTs. Though maybe what Rust picked for repr(C) enums is close enough.

@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark LLVM is nearly this except where it isn’t at all. WASM is sort of this except it’s not actually native; it’s just easier to target than the JVM or CLR.

@hikari @jrose @mcc @rf @whitequark brb, adding asm macro to wasm. :p