That assembly program the author compares to is waay bloated. This guy managed with 105 bytes: https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/tiny_elf_modernized.html (that is with overlapping part of the code into the ELF header and other similar level shenanigans). ;)

All kidding aside, interesting article.

The example FileDescriptorPollContext doesn’t really work. What if my runtime uses io-uring instead of polling? Those need very different interfaces to be sound. How do you abstract over that.

Swedish layout. Not ideal for coding (too many things like curly and square brackets etc are under altgr. And tilde and backtick are on dead keys.

But switching back and forth as soon as you need to write Swedish (for the letters åäö) is just too much work. And yes, in the Swedish alphabet they are separate letters, not aao with diacretics.

Two tips that work for me:

• After cargo add I have to sometimes run the “restart rust-analyzer” command from the vscode command pallette (exact wording may be off, I’m on my phone as of writing this comment). Much faster than cargo build.
• Consider using sccache to speed up rebuilds. It helps a lot, though uses a bit of disk space. But disk space is cheap nowadays (as long as you aren’t stuck with a laptop with soldered SSD, in which case you know what not to buy next time).

Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation!

Looks cool. Absolutely not my area of knowledge let alone expertise. But I thought digital colour stuff was all about ICC profiles (that basically describe how wrong a device handles colour and how to correct for it).

I don’t see any mention of ICC profiles in the docs though? Or is this the lower building block which you would use to work with data from ICC profiles? Basically I think I’m asking: who would use this crate and for what? Image viewers/editors?

I don’t feel like rust compile times are that bad, but I’m coming from C++ where the compile times are similar or even worse. (With gcc at work a full debug build takes 40 minutes, with clang it is down to about 17.)

Rust isn’t an interpreted or byte code compiled language, and as such it is hard to compete with that. But that is comparing apples and oranges really. Better to compare with other languages that compile to machine code. C and C++ comes to mind, though there are of course others that I have less experience with (Fortran, Ada, Haskell, Go, Zig, …). Rust is on par with or faster than C++ but much slower than C for sure. Both rust and C++ have way more features than C, so this is to be expected. And of course it also depends on what you do in your code (template heavy C++ is much slower to compile than C-like C++, similarly in Rust it depends on what you use).

That said: should we still strive to optimise the build times? Yes, of course. But please put the situation into the proper perspective and don’t compare to Python (there was a quote by a python developer in the article).

It all depends on what part you want to work with. But some understanding of the close to hardware aspects of rust wouldn’t hurt, comes in handy for debugging and optimising.

But I say that as somone who has a background (and job) in hard realtime c++ (writing control software for industrial vehicles). We recently did our first Rust project as a test at work though! I hope there will be more. But the question then becomes how to teach 200+ devs (over time, gradually presumably). For now it is just like 3 of us who know rust and are pushing for this and a few more that are interested.

I would indeed consider Go a bigger language, because I do indeed think in terms of the size of the runtime.

But your way of defining it also makes sense. Though in those terms I have no idea if Go is smaller or not (as I don’t know Go).

But Rust is still a small language by this definition, compared to for example C++ (which my day job still involves to a large extent). It is also much smaller than Python (much smaller standard library to learn). Definitely smaller than Haskell. Smaller than C I would argue (since there are leas footguns to keep in mind), though C has a smaller standard library to learn.

What other languages do I know… Erlang, hm again the standard library is pretty big, so rust is smaller or similar size I would argue. Shell script? Well arguably all the Unix commands are the standard library, so that would make shell script pretty big.

So yeah, rust is still a pretty small language compared to all other languages I know. Unsafe rust probably isn’t, but I have yet to need to write any (except one line to work around AsRawFd vs AsFd mismatch between two libraries).

can have a nontrivial (or “thick”) runtime and doesn’t need to limit itself to “zero-cost” abstractions.

Wouldn’t that be a bigger rust rather than a smaller one?

Not an area I’m particularly interested in, given that I do embedded and hard realtime development. Rust is the best language for that now, I just which allocations were fallible as well. And storage/allocator API was stabilised.

Here are some I found and used in my own code:

• itertools
• regex
• anyhow and thiserror (error handling)
• indoc (indented/formatted multi line string literals)
• strum (various derive macros for enums)
• petgraph (for working with general graphs)
• winnow is a great (and fast) parser combinator library.
• bpaf, clap and xflags are three different command line argument parser libraries. Which one to use depends on the needs of the project and if you need to match the behaviour of an existing non-rust program (as I needed to in one case)

Saying “it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson.

Sure, but git is aimed at programmers. Who should have learned graph theory in university. It was past of the very first course I had as an undergraduate many years ago.

Git is definitely hard though for almost all the reasons in the article, perhaps other reasons too. But not understanding what a DAG is shouldn’t be one of them, for the intended target audience.

1. Not for me. It is clearly not trying to be a systems programming language. And that is why I’m interested in Rust. I work in hard realtime (day job) and do embedded as a hobby.
   That rust is also useful higher up the stack is just a nice bonus to me which means I can keep using it when writing automation things that are too complex for a simple shell script (it has largely replaced python for this purpose for me now).

2. Rust gained momentum because it filled a niche that was unoccupied (systems capable but safe and high level). Oxide seems to be aiming for an area already occupied by Rust from one side and things like Go from the other side. That rarely works out.