> These complaints are valid, but my argument is that they’re also not NEW, and they’re certainly not unique to Rust ... The only thing new about it is that programmers are exposed to more of the costs of it up-front.
While thats true, it completely misses the point. The point is not that dependencies exist, or even that a package might have many dependencies.
The point is, Rust (and NPM) I have found many times dont care or even consider the impact of a large amount of dependencies, and often take no steps to mitigate or reduce that number.
As others said, some features could be split off into other crates. Maybe someone only needs HTTP, or maybe they need HTTPS but no Async. Or maybe they dont need logging. With Hyper and others you just have to build everything whether you want it or not.
I agree with this, but that's not what your original post says. Or at least, it’s not what I understood from reading it. :)
> The point is, Rust (and NPM)
and C, in many real-world cases, which is why the above post matters.
Same in Rust. Actually, it's quite better than in C. The only time Rust projects fail to compile is when they pull in some C library and something there (like configure.ac) messed up. :D
And if this C project does anything interesting it pulls in bunch of C libraries that came precompiled with your OS, and might be stale and contain unpatched security vulns.
C/C++ developers pointing at other languages about dependency hell is a curiosity.
This is the primary reason I try to avoid projects built with npm. Fucking dependency hell. If the project hasn't been actively maintained in the last 3 months your chances of getting it to work drop precipitously.
People love to trash Perl on HN. But among many other things that Perl devs understood, they deeply understood issues that come up with dependencies. Most CPAN modules are namespaced, have unit tests, and unit tests run when modules are installed. Not only that, the people behind CPAN understood that it is a community effort and you, as a library author, have certain responsibilities to your community.
https://pause.perl.org/pause/query?ACTION=pause_04about
None of that exists in npm. We have scopes in npm, and that's about it. CPAN makes npm look like a child's toy.
That's funny, because it's only "new" if your experiences primarily lie in newer languages and communities. There's a lot of criticism of C, but one thing it does is make dependencies pretty explicit. Some say that's good, some say that's bad, I guess it can be both at different times.
Let's say you open up a new C codebase: What are its dependencies? You'll have to hunt through its README (hopefully it's up to date!), other build instructions, maybe CMake, maybe some custom build system, etc.
What version of dependencies does it use? If the code has been vendored, you at least know what code its using - but where do you look for updates to that code? Do you manually go out to wherever it was copied from now and then and look for updates? If the code isn't vendored, then how was it installed? From the package manager? If so, what operating system and version was used during development? If its not from a package, its might have been downloaded and installed manually? Again, where was it downloaded from? Where was it installed? What options did it use when it was compiled?
How do you handle transitive dependencies? Probably by hand. How well documented are they?
C suffers plenty of dependency issues.
Also if you are dynamic linking, ldd(1) can give you a pretty good picture.
TLS implementions are often giant hairballs but one that many things depend on. You can think of it as a somewhat "system level" dependency.
Also, I coud imagine Rust's type-system raises the bar of dependencies that can be mangaged before everything breaks down. So a lib with 100 deps in NPM isn't the same as a lib with 100 deps in Cargo.
Edit: I mean if you don't use ~ or ^ in your nose dependencies,. Just explicit versions.
I am all about improving the world, don't get me wrong, but saying "hey this software works just like all the other software" isn't really the insult that you seem to think that it is.
Well, it's common knowledge that most existing software is compete and utter crap, as evidenced by the fact that our first thought upon hearing that a particular piece of software is no longer being updated is not "oh good, it is (probably) finished and we can rely on it", but rather "on no, now the innumerable defects no doubt still latent in it will remain unfixed". So "this software is just as bad as all the other software" is, while not a very grave insult in a relative sense, still quite damning in absolute terms.
One good thing about stat counters for packages combined with GitHub for issue tracking of you can kind of tell.
It does take some level of die diligence and isn't easy. But neither is anything relying on say system installed libraries in C projects.
I'd rather have the package managers than not.
- a significant (eg, at least as complex as wget) software project,
- that has been unmaintained (no updates, code has the same MD5/etc hash),
- with a significant userbase (not sure exactly how to define that one),
- for a significant amount of time (at least five years),
- which is generally regarded as finished and bug-free (not in need of further development) rather than abandoned?
Because I can't think of a single one, and the only ones that even come close are video games where the known bugs were co-opted into gameplay features. The general consensus seems to be that any system that doesn't have automatic updates running is de-facto insecure (which, since every update mechanism I've heard of can introduce new code (ie new security vulnerabilities), means any system whatsoever is insecure).
(I don't quite disagree with the tacit assertion that actually getting things right on - if not the first try - then at least one of the first thirty or so is a extremely, maybe even unreasonably high standard, but it manifestly is a standard that basically all existing nontrivial software projects fail to meet.)
They could have said it straight "Guys highly optimized, safe compilation of medium size project will be in range of 20-30 min". And that would great and honest way to deal. Instead we get oh, we have reduced compile times from 26 minutes to 21 minutes so it is 19% improvement in just one year and there is more to come. Now this is hard work and great but I am sure Rust committers understand when people say fast compile times they most likely comparing to Go etc which would be under a minute for most mid size projects. And this is very well not going to happen.
Same is now to Cargo dependency situation. Cargo and NPM are ideologically in agreement that people in general should just pull it from package manager instead of rewriting even little bit of code. And again instead of owning it there will be list of shallow reasoning: others do it too, reusing is better that rewriting, cargo is so awesome that pulling crate is much easier and so on.
TBH you seem to have a really odd bias against Rust, you repeatedly take something about it that's positive and try to spin it as negative, like possibly even for years? Maybe examine that.