It does have that, the ecosystem is just really fractured and also not good.

Sort of the ‘standard’ way of managing dependencies is with Pip and a requirements.txt. By itself, that installs dependencies on your host system.
So, there’s a second tool, venv, to install them per-project, but because it’s a separate tool, it has to do some wacky things, namely it uses separate pip and python executables, which you have to specify in your IDE.
But then Pip also can’t build distributions, there’s a separate tool for that, setup.py, and it doesn’t support things like .lock-files for reproducible builds, and if I remember correctly, it doesn’t deal well with conflicting version requirements and probably various other things.

Either way, people started building a grand unified package manager to cover all these use-cases. Well, multiple people did so, separately. So, now you’ve got, among others:

• Pipenv
• Pip-tools
• Conda
• PDM
• Poetry
• Rye

Well, and these started creating their own methods of specifying dependencies and I believe, some of them still need to be called like a venv, but others not, so that means IDEs struggle to support all these.

Amazingly, apart from Rye, which didn’t exist back when we started that project, none of these package managers support directly depending on libraries within the same repo. You always have to tag a new version, publish it, and then you can fix your dependent code.

And yeah, that was then the other reason why this stuff didn’t work for us. We spent a considerable amount of time with symlinks and custom scripts to try to make that work.
I’m willing to believe that we fucked things up when doing that, but what makes still no sense is that everything worked when running tests from the CLI, but the IDE showed nothing but red text.

I mean, if we’re talking about all those problems, the no-type-annotations issue is rather specific for Python, JS/TS and Ruby.

But in general, I feel like there’s somewhat of an old world vs. new world divide, which happened when package registries started accepting libraries from everyone and their cat.

In C, for example, most libraries you’ll use will be quite well-documented, but you’ll also never hear of the library that Greg’s cat started writing for the niche thing that you’re trying to do.

Unfortunately, Greg’s cat got distracted by a ball of yarn rolling by and then that was more fun than writing documentation.
That’s the tradeoff, you get access to more libraries, but you just can’t expect all of them to be extremely high-quality…

Honestly also annoying as a not-so-new folk. I just thought about this yesterday, I reasonably expect to clone a random project from the internet written Java, Rust et al, and to be able to open it in my IDE and look at it.

Meanwhile, a Python project from two years ago that I helped to build, I do not expect to be able to reasonably view in an IDE at all. I remember, we gave up trying to fix all the supposedly missing dependencies at some point…

I’m guessing, they meant to write “that the language has no default way”.

I don’t know, man, far too many people seem to think that “easy to learn” means they’ll know all they need to know in relatively short time.

Like, you talk to our data scientists and they’ll tell you doing anything in Python, no problem. But you talk to our seasoned software engineers and you see the war flashbacks in their eyes, because it racks up in complexity so fucking quickly, it’s insane.

But that’s what I mentioned regarding Java there. Java calls them “exceptions”, but generally forces the caller to either handle them or explicitly bubble them upwards…

I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Them announcing something like this looks good PR-wise, so they’ll do it, even if they don’t actually expect this effort to lead to anything.

But even if they do implement such an API, companies won’t start adopting this API until its capabilities are roughly comparable to the kernel-level solution AND it’s available on most Windows systems in the wild. So, we’re likely talking more than a decade before this sees sufficient adoption…

The guy keeps on picking on Go, which is infamous for having terrible error handling, and then he has the nerve to even pick on the UNIX process return convention, which was designed in the 70s.
The few times he mentions Rust, for whatever reason he keeps on assuming that .unwrap() is the only choice, which’s use is decidedly discouraged in production code.

I do think there is room for debate here. But error handling is a hellishly complex topic, with different needs between among others:

• short- vs. long-running processes
• API vs. user-facing
• small vs. big codebase
• library vs. application code
• prototyping vs. production phase

And even if you pick out a specific field, the two concepts are not clearly separated.
Error values in Rust usually have backtraces these days, for example (unless you’re doing embedded where this isn’t possible).
Or Java makes you list exceptions in your function signature (except for unchecked exceptions), so you actually can’t just start throwing new exceptions in your little corner without the rest of the codebase knowing.
I find it quite difficult to properly define the differences between the two.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how dyslexia works, but either way, I didn’t write that. And while the title of the article suggests otherwise, the news here isn’t that Google says something is easy. The news is that they published a guide to make that thing easy.

Wut? They’re a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
While they (and everyone using Rust) will benefit off of more people using Rust, it’s not like they have a vested interest to the point of spreading misinformation.

I have actually seen it in an XML file in the wild. Never quite understood why they did it. Anything they encoded into there, they could have just added a node for.
But it was an XML format that was widely used in a big company, so presumably somewhere someone wrote a shitty XML parser that can’t deal with additional nodes. Or they were just scared of touching the existing structure, I don’t know.

The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.

If you’ve so far been able to do this stuff in Java, then presumably all your hardware has an OS and such and you don’t need this, but a colleague has been having a lot of fun with Rust and proper embedded development.

It’s very different from regular development, as you’ve got no OS, no filesystem, no memory allocations, no logging. It can most definitely be a pain.
But the guy always has the biggest grin on his face when he tells that he made a custom implementation of the CAN protocol (TCP is too complex for embedded 🙃) and that he had to integrate an LED to output error information and stuff like that. At the very least, it seems to be a lot less abstract, as you’re working directly with the hardware.

Hmm, I’ve never looked too much at benchmarks for this, but is there reason to believe Python would use less memory for a similarly complex project? It still needs a runtime, and it has to do a larger interpretation step at runtime (i.e. it needs to start from human-readable code rather than from bytecode)…

Yeah, we do this regularly at $DAYJOB, although we use Cross.

Basically, if you pull in any libraries with vendored C code, like e.g. OpenSSL, then you’d need to configure a linker and set up cross-compilation for C code.
Cross does the whole compilation in a container where this is already set up, so you just need to install Docker or Podman on your host system.

Basically:

cargo install cross

cross build --release --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

…and out plops your binary for a Raspberry Pi.

I tried something like that once. Basically, I was trying to create an API with which sysadmins could script deployments. That involves lots of strings, so I was hoping I could avoid the String vs. &str split by making everything &'static str.

And yeah, the problem is that this only really works within one function. If you need to pass a parameter into a function, that function either accepts a &'static reference which makes it impossible to call this function with an owned type or non-static reference, or you make it accept any reference, but then everything below that function has normal borrowing semantics again.

I guess, with the former you could Box::leak() to pass an owned type or non-static reference, with the downside of all your APIs being weird.
Or maybe your prototyping just happens at the top and you’re fine with making individual functions accept non-static references. I guess, you’ll still have to try it.

Since you’re already at the bargaining stage of grief programming, maybe you’re aware, but Rc and Arc are the closest you can get to a GC-like feel. These do reference counting, so unlike GC, they can’t easily deal with cyclic references, but aside from that, same thing.
Unfortunately, they do still have the same problem with passing them as parameters…

Blocking a community is possible from the context menu in the community overview page (tap on the community name):

Blocking an instance (which is a whole server with multiple communities) is possible via the web interface, but I don’t think, it’s possible in Jerboa yet.

Yeah, I don’t think that can happen without splitting the whole ecosystem in half. Garbage collection requires a runtime, and tons of the code semantics are also just different between the two, particularly with asynchronous code.

I also imagine that many people wouldn’t just leave their particular program in the GC version, but never even bother to learn the ownership/borrowing semantics, even though those largely stop being painful after a few months.

But yeah, I actually don’t think it’s too bad to have individual parts of the ecosystem using their own memory management strategies.
The two examples that I can think of are ECS for gamedev and signals/reactivity for UI frameworks. Which is what is used in C++ or JavaScript, Kotlin, too. You’d probably still want to use these strategies, even if you’ve got garbage collection available…

How many bugs you encounter is unfortunately not a good metric, because devs will compensate by just thinking harder. The goal is rather to not need to think as hard, which increases productivity and helps out your team members (including your future self).

It took me a few months of working in an immutable-by-default language before I had the epiphany that everything is exactly like it’s written down in code (so long as it’s not marked as mutable). I don’t need to look at each variable and think about whether it might get changed somewhere down the line. A whole section of my brain just switched off that day.

As the other person said, there’s also nothing stopping you from using mutability, it’s just not the default, because most variables simply don’t get mutated, even in C code.
But I would even go so far that Rust is actually making mutability fashionable again. It has introduced various new concepts in this regard, which you won’t know from other languages.

For example, you can opt a variable into mutability, make your changes and then opt out of it again.
And if a function wants to modify one of its parameters, you have to explicitly pass a mutable reference, which is visible both in the function signature and where you’re calling the function.

But perhaps most importantly, it blocks you from mutating variables that you’ve passed into a different thread (unless you wrap the value in a mutex or similar).
In most of the immutable languages up until this point, the immutability was achieved by always copying memory when you want to change it, which is insanely inefficient. Rust doesn’t need this, by instead requiring that you follow its ownership/borrowing rules.

Edit:
I also don’t know what you heard, but this is for example written in Rust: https://bevyengine.org/examples/3d-rendering/bloom-3d/
The code is right below. It uses lots of mutability…

It’s the “Entity-Component-System architecture”, consisting out of:

• entities, which are basically just IDs to associate different components,
• components, which are individual data points like the health or the position or the velocity of an entity, and
• systems, which operate on components to introduce interactivity. For example, you might have a system which looks at all entities with a position and a velocity component, and then it just adds the velocity to the position. Then another system checks for collisions based on the position component and the dimensions component, and then subtracts from the health component when a collision happened.

It’s kind of a competing strategy to OOP. It offers better performance and better flexibility, at the cost of being somewhat more abstract and maybe not quite as intuitive. But yeah, those former two advantages make it very popular for simulations / gamedev. Any major game engine has an ECS architecture under the hood, or at least something similar to it.