Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
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
1 replies
mcc
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@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"
1 replies
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to mcc)
@mcc i think that attitude might come from the fact that newcomers often recoil at discovering this language is significantly different from ones they're familiar with, and saying something like “no really, this thing is good, please spend a while longer with it, you'll get it eventually” is important for them. but then this mantra gets repeated also at people who've gotten enough experience to really see where things fail. the eternally troublesome context problem
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Saagar Jha)
mcc
(replying to mcc)
@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.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
(replying to mcc)
@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
2 replies
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to ✧✦Catherine✦✧)
@whitequark @mcc ow ow oof owie ow
(i haven't burned out but it's like, there's a number of little problems with the language i've wanted to fix that i just never did because it'd be so much work)
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@whitequark @mcc and so often even a seemingly tiny simple fix would actually be a lot of work for historical reasons
rf
(replying to ✧✦Catherine✦✧)
@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
mcc
(replying to rf)
@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.
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to mcc)
@mcc @rf @whitequark decoupling the ABI from C would solve so many problems
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@mcc @rf @whitequark or rather decoupling ABI from languages generally. i want a universal cross-language native interface definition format
2 replies
Erin 💽✨
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark blank stare approximately once every decade someone reinvents Microsoft COM
1 replies
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Erin 💽✨)
@erincandescent @rf @mcc @whitequark i was considering mentioning COM actually. i was also thinking about WinRT
Erin 💽✨
(replying to Erin 💽✨)
@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark And don’t get me wrong. COM is a great idea
Its also a terrible lowest-common-denominator thing almost by definition.
Erin 💽✨
(replying to Erin 💽✨)
@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark Fun fact of the day: Did you know that IUnknown made its way into CoreFoundation?
Its used as the backend for CFPlugin
1 replies
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Erin 💽✨)
@erincandescent @rf @mcc @whitequark …what???
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@erincandescent @rf @mcc @whitequark okay tbf IUnknown is pretty minimal and i suppose they can't put a dependency on core foundation or libobjc inside core foundation
Erin 💽✨
(replying to Erin 💽✨)
@hikari @mcc @rf @whitequark (I think this one will amuse Hikari most of all)
Jordan
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
@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.
Jordan
(replying to Jordan)
@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.
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Jordan)
@jrose @mcc @rf @whitequark llvm is extremely not this in practice. wasm is maybe our only hope
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
i'm like this close to unfollowing someone i know because all they do is dunk on people
Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many)
(replying to Iwasawa 🌟 (one hikari of too many))
don't retweet this btw i don't want this to get seen by a ton of people who'll project things onto me