
Rust and the limits of swarm design - berkut
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7303
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bluejekyll
I don't really get this argument/issue he's raising. Yes, important person in
the OSS community, but this feels like a hit piece.

What's the core of the issue? That you should consider going and looking at
the code before you decide to use it. Isn't this a good thing? In fact, I
started committing back to some projects _because_ I read the code, and
decided I wanted something in addition or minor change. This encourages
community IMO.

The examples of Python seem really strange too, because I've found Python to
have horribly divergent implementations with severe faults if you choose one
over another. Rust is a smaller and younger ecosystem, but I haven't really
had that problem yet. I do find myself researching my dependencies more, but
shouldn't we all be doing that anyway? I'll pick something that it looks like
is actively developed over something that hasn't had a commit in years.

Point, Rust hasn't hurt me in terms of dependencies yet in the same way that I
have been in other languages. Now, I know I will be burned by a dependency in
the future, I can guarantee it, but I also know that the openness and
helpfulness of the community will mean that fixing it will be easy and
encouraged.

Disclaimer: I love Rust.

~~~
fiedzia
> That you should consider going and looking at the code before you decide to
> use it. Isn't this a good thing?

No, its not. There are many problems with it, including wasted time and
fragmentation. First, "looking at the code" means you need to spend time on
discovering, than assessing 50 existing libraries, each of them half-baked and
broken in some ways. Had one of them been blessed by inclusion in stdlib, 90%
of people would not spend a second on any decisions and just use that one.
Multiply that by all libraries you depend on and it comes to sizeable amount
of time. Whatever you choose however, may be abandoned a week later, so you
will be responsible for maintaining it. Also once you learn one of those,
you'll work on next project that have chosen another so your knowledge and
util functions need to be redone. This is entirely pointless madness. Having
rich stdlib (or some other way of enforcing unification) is really a good
thing, and not having it causes a lot of problems.

> I do find myself researching my dependencies more, but shouldn't we all be
> doing that anyway?

No, we should not. We should have one way put in front of us and be certain
that it works well for common usecases, will have long term support and
everyone else is most likely to use it too. An extreme example of that is
C/C++, where nearly every major library comes with its own string
implementation.

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steveklabnik
The top comment on /r/rust is worth reading:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5nu1w7/rust_and_the_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5nu1w7/rust_and_the_limits_of_swarm_design/dcebolj/)

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buzzybee
Swarms of alternatives is a penalty of success, not failure. It's what
Javascript looks like now, for better or worse.

~~~
fiedzia
It is sign of success, but its not a good thing. Its just a lack of proper
process for building stdlib. And I would not say that this part of js looks
good.

