Comment by imsnif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imsnif | Hacker News Reader

Hey,

I am the author of "what" and am very happy to hear people like this tool I made. :)

"what" was my first real attempt at rust, and I love the project very much.

That said, it is a hobby project - and so I will likely be a few days responding to all issues and contributions that came from this thread.

"what" has already received some great contributions that are major parts of the code base. I would be very happy for more (in the form of features, bug fixes, issues and packaging).

A note to those having issues installing: as mentioned in this thread, packaging for all the various linux distributions and mac is a great effort. I apologize that at the moment the installation is a little bumpy (especially for those not very familiar with rust).

A good first step for if "cargo install what" isn't working is to try to `rustup update` so you get the latest version of rust and cargo.

Other than that, I hope to support your setup in the future, and/or hear from you in the issues of the repo. Debug help for OSes I do not have access to would be greatly appreciated. :)

Thank you all!

What are your thoughts on Rust so far? What primary language(s) did you come from?

I've been planning to learn Rust but haven't made the leap yet because I expect a big time commitment due to the learning curve. I poked around your source code and it was inspiring. Your code looks simple and straightforward compared to some of the other Rust projects I've examined.

That's high praise - thank you very much for saying so.

My major language in recent years has been javascript (and years before that perl). Rust was a breath of fresh air for me as I did not previously have "access" to system-level functionality.

I very much love the ease with which I can rely on other people's code (feels like home coming from node.js) - even though as mentioned in this thread it does have its downsides (eg. longer compiler times).

The learning curve is indeed challenging, but the tooling is amazing, the compiler has better error messages than I could even have imagined, and the community is incredibly friendly and welcoming. All in all, I'd say it's worth the effort. :)

Thanks for the tool. Easier install methods would be great. For now I've added the following to my bootstrap makefile:

    wget -qO- https://github.com/imsnif/what/releases/download/${WHAT_VERSION}/what-v${WHAT_VERSION}-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz |  tar xvz -C ~/bin/

Care to share the bootstrap makefile?

https://github.com/owais/dotfiles/blob/master/Makefile

It's a mess and I've not used it for a while (haven't setup a new computer lately) but gets the point across.

It's amazing that your packaged linux binary release runs without issue on my decade old Ubuntu 10.04 box.

Any plans about create a library around this tool?

I'd be very happy to merge such a PR. Do you have a specific use case in mind?

Never used rust so I didn't know cargo was part of rust. Thought it was some other big install tool like brew.

Got it now but there's an error. Anyway, I've always wanted a tool like this, so I'm looking forward to its development. Thank you!

It's a tool to manage dependencies for rust and can also install rust programs (it will download, compile and install)

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