Hacker News Reader

Comment by eej2ya1K | Hacker News Reader

It's taking off, sure, but every single piece of Rust software I've tried has been, uh, I'll be nice and say not to my taste. Almost like the safety guarantees Rust provides means that developers stop caring about portability, UNIX conventions or just... general... comfiness.

View on HN

As a Windows user, the Rust ecosystem feels far more portable than any other ecosystem I've used; I run into issues extremely rarely, even though most people are on Mac OS or Linux. (Our last survey did show ~30% of people using Windows, though.)

Yeah this is a big benefit that is undersold. If I were in the C or C++ ecosystem, I probably wouldn't be able to support Windows as well as I do. It would be too much work. The foundations on which Rust's standard library are built means I can regularly go through entire release cycles without opening my Windows laptop to test anything. Which saves a lot of context switching overhead for me personally.

Do you have some examples of what you've experienced that you didn't like? I keep reading about people replacing tools written in C with Rust versions but I haven't really pursued it further and seen them in action.

The last one I tried was ripgrep, and something about the default behavior just drove me insane... I'll freely admit that it's all about aesthetics and there's no right answer, but that doesn't mean my preferences go away ;)

It's not meant to work exactly like `grep`, if that's what you're on about. If anything, I'd say reimplementing working tools in another language is pointless.

It's like when bands cover songs. Who cares if another band plays the song if they don't put their own spin on it?

So it's more that you don't care for the tool than the language in this case. Although, I invite you to try ripgrep again and/or lay out some of your gripes with it. I find it a very good replacement for grep.

    alias rg="rg -uuu"

That will disable all smart filtering and make it behave more like `grep -r`. Defaults matter and a lot of folks appreciate them, including plenty of old Unix greybeards that I've talked to about it. (I used plain grep myself for well over ten years before writing ripgrep.) But the defaults don't need to pin you down. They can be disabled very easily. :)

Did you not also mention problems with portability and UNIX conventions?

Yes, and sorry, that's not specifically related to ripgrep. About a year ago I tried to compile a few rust tools and a bunch of them just straight up didn't work at all because they made assumptions that are only valid for debian/ubuntu based distros.

I'm glad people are enjoying rust, and sure, memory safety is nice. Fun and comfort are even better, though, so I'll stick to C, Lua and Go for my personal projects.

Yeah, I was just surprised since I specifically found Rust tools to generally both fun and comfortable due to having (what I consider) excellent UX.

Here is for instance a Rust tool that I just stumbled upon that seems to have an exemplary UX and adherence to Unix principles while packing a lot of features which I would personally call "fun".

https://github.com/sharkdp/pastel

Wow, that's a tool that I didn't know I needed until now. Being a back-end engineer I don't often deal with color information, but every once in a while I have to build a web page or tweak some CSS and it always a pain for me to remember color hex values. This tool should make this much easier. As a bonus, it gives you similar colors and can generate random or distinct color pallets.

When it comes to portability, Go is really awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com