Hehe, yeah, I actually agree in principle, although in the context of web tooling I think it’s at least understandable. For many years, web tooling was almost exclusively written in JavaScript itself, which was hailed as a feature, since it allowed JS developers to easily jump in and help improve their own tooling. And it made the stack relatively simple: All you needed was Node.js and you were good to go.

Something like the Google Closure Compiler, written in Java, was for many years better than comparable tooling written in JS, but remained in obscurity, partially because it was cumbersome to setup and people didn’t want to deal with Java.

Then the JS ecosystem ran into a wall. JS projects were becoming bigger and bigger, and the performance overhead of their homegrown tooling started frustrating more and more. That just happened to be the time that Rust came around, and it happened to tick all the boxes:

• It showed that it can solve the performance bottlenecks.
• It has great support for WASM, which many web developers were having an interest in.
• Its syntax is familiar enough for TypeScript developers.
• It has a good story around interior mutability, which is a common frustration among TypeScript developers, especially those familiar with React.

I think these things combined helped the language to quickly win the hearts and minds of many in the web community. So now we’re in a position where just name dropping “Rust” can be a way to quickly resonate with those developers, because they associate it with fast and reliable and portable. In principle you’re right, it should just be an implementation detail. But through circumstance it seems to have also become an expression of mindshare – ie. a marketing tool.

Finding a Webpack replacement that doesn’t use NPM at all is going to be hard, but there are certainly alternatives that don’t require the 1000+ NPM dependencies required to use Webpack.

Some alternatives you can consider are Rsbuild and Farm. Part of the reason they use so much fewer NPM dependencies is because they’re written in Rust, so they’ll have Cargo dependencies instead, but you shouldn’t notice anything of that. Of course if you want to audit everything it’s not that much easier, but at least the Cargo ecosystem seems to have avoided quite some of the mistakes that NPM made. But yes, in the end it still comes down to the extent that you trust your dependencies.

Yeah, I mix them too, although I apply quite a bit of functional techniques especially at the architectural level as well. OO I use mostly for dealing with I/O and other areas where statefulness cannot be avoided.

If you’re interested, I also wrote an in-depth blog where I touch on these topics: https://arendjr.nl/blog/2024/07/post-architecture-premature-abstraction-is-the-root-of-all-evil/

Just keep in mind that inheritance is nowadays a very contested feature. Even most people still invested in object oriented programming recognise that in hindsight inheritance was mostly a mistake. The industry as a whole is also making a shift to move more towards functional programming, in which object orientation as a whole is taking more of a backseat and inheritance specifically is not even supported anymore. So yeah, take the chance to learn, but be cautious before going into any one direction too deeply.

I was aware that indeed the trait and lifetime bounds were an artifact of the Tokio work-stealing behavior, but Evan makes a very well-explained case for why we might want to consider stepping away from such behavior as a default in Rust. If anything, it makes me thankful the Rust team is taking a slow-and-steady approach to the whole async thing instead of just making Tokio part of the standard library as some have wished for. Hopefully this gets the consideration it deserves and we all end up with a more ergonomic solution in the end.

0° being “very cold” and 100° being “very hot” is intuitive.

As someone who’s not used to Fahrenheit I can tell you there’s nothing intuitive about it. How cold is “very cold” exactly? How hot is “very hot” exactly? Without clear references all the numbers in between are meaningless, which is exactly how I perceive any number in Fahrenfeit. Intuitive means that without knowing I should have an intuitive perception, but really there’s nothing to go on. I guess from your description 50°F should mean it’s comfortable? Does that mean I can go out in shorts and a t-shirt? It all seems guesswork.

The System76 scheduler helps to tune for better desktop responsiveness under high load: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler I think if you use Pop!OS this may be set up out-of-the-box.

It’s a bit arguing about semantics really. But Rust and Haskell are merely the first ones with patches out. The issue affects other languages as well, including Java, Node.js, Python and seemingly every language with Windows support. I think it’s fair to call it a Windows problem, since it affects everyone there.

But languages like Rust and Haskell are promising their users that they are protected from this kind of behavior, which is why they want to patch it quickly. Some of the others merely updated the documentation, effectively saying yeah it’s a risk. Java went as far as saying they won’t fix the issue.

Good question! 😂 maybe I’m overthinking it, but you seem to be making the point that it’s silly for people to like WASM based on the argument the JVM already exists and people are not fond of it/Java. If that’s not the point, why did you make the meme at all?

Of course, technically you can compile anything to almost anything. But I don’t think linking to a project that’s unmaintained for 15 years really helps your argument.

This is the actual PR, btw: https://github.com/getgrit/gritql/pull/85

I totally agree with this comment, and on top of that I would recommend anyone who really cares about the current state of affairs regarding safety in C++ to read this overview: https://accu.org/journals/overload/32/179/teodorescu/

Quote:

Personally, I am not convinced that in the near future, C++ can do something to stop this trend. C++ will leak talent to other languages (currently Rust, but perhaps in the future to Cppfront, Carbon, Hylo or Swift). If the progress towards safety started in 2015 as Bjarne suggested, the last 8 years have seen very little progress in safety improvements. Even with accelerated efforts, the three-year release cycle and slow adoption of new standards will keep C++ a decade away from addressing major safety concerns.