TWiR quote of the week

Quoting @ssokolow on this reddit post: Blog Post: Builder Lite : rust

Rust's devs came from the functional programming world (To the point that rustc was originally written in Ocaml and people have called Rust "an ML with C++ syntax" and joked about it being "an attempt to trick C++ programmers into writing Haskell") and, generally speaking, when they don't have a feature like Higher-Kinded Types, it's not for lack of trying.

Ironically this quote probably won't make it into next week's TWiR because of ssokolow's own submission above

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It happened when I least expected it.

Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. "From now on", they declared, "all our new stuff must be written in Rust".

I'm not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe they've been reading propaganda. Maybe they fell prey to some confident asshole, and convinced themselves that Rust was the answer to their problems.

I don't know what they see in it, to be honest. It's like I always say: it's not a data race, it's a data marathon.

At any rate, I now find myself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and a lot of compile errors.

Jesus that's a lot of compile errors.

fasterthanlime in The curse of strong typing

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I wrote a bespoke time-series database in Rust a few years ago, and it has had exactly one issue since I stood it up in production, and that was due to pessimistic filesystem access patterns, rather than the language. This thing is handling hundreds of thousands of inserts per second, and it's even threaded.

Given that I've been programming professionally for over a decade in Python, Perl, Ruby, C, C++, Javascript, Java, and Rust, I'll pick Rust absolutely any time that I want something running that I won't get called at 3 AM to fix. It probably took me 5 times as long to write it as if I did it in Go or Python, but I guarantee it's saved me 10 times as much time I would have otherwise spent triaging, debugging, and running disaster recovery.

--Taywee from the Hacker News network

Credit to @steveklabnik for calling this one out on Twitter.

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a wise man once said: give a man tests and he will find bugs for a day, teach a man to fuzz and he will find bugs for the rest of his life

FormalFerris on twitter

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true fact: the rust programming language actually evolved independently 5 times in a process known as 'carcinization'

Also from @FormalFerris on Twitter referencing this article on carcinization in actual crustaceans :joy:

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Because lower-level software has more operational constraints than higher-level software (e.g. it typically cannot tolerate a runtime or memory management via garbage collection), developing a memory safe language suitable for systems software is particularly challenging. The Rust language has met that challenge, however, and is an excellent candidate for replacing C in many systems applications.

We plan to invest in the tools that allow systems engineers to move their software to Rust. This means investing in improving package management, compilers, and Foreign Function Interface (FFI) generators. In many cases this will include providing interfaces compatible with existing widely-used components to enable transition. With these tools, adoption of a memory safe alternative will scale much faster without replication of efforts.

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Rwlock vs Mutex? Please, tell me like I'm 5

Mutex: "Mom says it's my turn on the synchronization primitive."
vs.
Write lock: "Hey! You all are not allowed to look until I'm done writing!"
Read lock: "Hey! You are not allowed to edit what you wrote until we're done reading it!"

Thanks for an actual 5 year old reply, made me laugh

/u/LyonSyonII and /u/everything-narrative on /r/rust: Reddit - Dive into anything

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That doesn't look like it's from the White House, though.

Sources providing the origin of the above White House OSS Mobilization Plan whitepaper:

It has white house backing, but was drafted by OpenSSF.

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From...

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STiAT on Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 - Phoronix Forums

Hmh, would like to rewrite my 20 year old C driver for a industry infrared camera and flash I used for monitoring a chicken coop in Rust.

Just to see what it's like if done in Rust. I didn't dally much in kernel code, but this sounds like something which could be done.

Though, the chicken coop monitor and gate opener/closer long got replaced by more modern stuff by now which run on Linux out of the box.

By the way, we thought it was a fox and wondered how got over/past the fence... It actually was a Hawk going after the Chickens in daylight.

I just really want there to be a quote about a chicken coop in TWiR

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Looks like this quote got overlooked!

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… [ergonomics] is a downstream symptom, whereas the inclusivity thing is the upstream driver for all of that. So that's where you get ergonomics, right? If you don't care about inclusivity for beginners and whatever, then you're not going to care about that.

1 Like

Jake Goulding: mem::replace / mem::swap ===

cuviper: except rustc would tell Indy that's a type mismatch

Jake Goulding: Yes, that would be the boulder, I assume.

Jake Goulding: Older compilers were more aggressive in error reporting.

https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/122651-general/topic/Clone.20implementation.20for.20Box

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Learning Rust has taught me something - "There are really no problems, just adventure and opportunities"

(generally submitted quotes are quoted from an outside source with attribution, not just said in this thread)

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I never knew, I'll do better next time

So I can't make this a submission? :worried:

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it'd be hypocritical to say no. [--end sidenote]

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The long compile times where all responsibility is taken away from you is infinitely more effective than submission patterns in BDSM, where the graceful rustc takes over and all you have to do is wait until they tell you that you're a good person and that everything is alright!

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/w0oyo5/programming_in_rust_has_to_be_one_of_the_most/igfs4fw/

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