> We actually did have this once, but it wasn't really worth it, so it was removed.
Ah, yeah I had a vague memory that that was the case, which is why I asked.. I seem to recall it being removed, but I only follow Rust news, don't use it, so I wasn't sure of the reasons or implications.
> but I assure you that if you actually used it, you would have found what you suggested even uglier.
It's not fair to make that judgment for someone, particularly because people using Rust at the time weren't complaining much about how ugly it was. At the time it was questioned whether the change was desirable and that very blog post braces for opposition under Wait, doesn’t this make it hard to know what your program does?
Fwiw, that's one instance where unnecessary information/features were removed I would rather had been preserved.
> Which brings me directly to what bothers me about the crate system and the sociology behind it – I don’t see any pruning. Worse, I don’t see much understanding of the need for it. A lot of Rustaceans don’t seem to grasp why, when the question is “where do I get feature X?” the answer “oh, there are 23 crates for that” is objectively terrifying.
Actually, I think the community does recognize that this is a problem they are running into as they scale up. Previously there was the discussion of the Rust Platform [1] as a pseudo-stdlib which was received with a lot of mixed since the Python approach isn't actually all rainbows and sunshine. More recently, there has been effort to try to improve the discoverability of relevant crates [2].
> Well, they just took down rust's package manager on Github.
Just in case anyone skims this far and panics by misreading jkrems' post, I should clarify that they took down the Google search results for Cargo, rather than the Github repo [1]. Unfortunately, for the average user, removing something from Google may as well be a complete takedown...
>> I find Rust (the spec, though also the implemenration) quite safe and practical (a balance). It deserves some independent implementations to secure a long and stable future.
Where is the Rust spec? Unless something happened really quickly that I was not aware of there is only the implementation.
> The main thing I want for Async Rust is the ability to not use it.
This is what many of us want. Sadly this doesn't seem to be a use-case many in rust are interested in supporting as a first class citizen (from what I've read at least).
I remember seeing someone being down-voted into oblivion for the mere suggestion of some sort of basic fallback executor in the standard library.
> The problem is that Rust async was rushed without careful deliberation, which causes a number of problems without a clear solution in sight.
Are we talking about the same Rust? I remember the debate and consideration over async was enormous and involved. It was practically the polar opposite of “without careful deliberation”.
> just use async everywhere. That’s not the solution in Rust. It simply won’t work for the same reason that Rust isn’t GC’d.
At this point, I have to say RC is a primitive form of GC and it would mostly work. Not high performance but it would work.
> To be clear, I hate programming language development driven by memes. I don’t think that was the case with Rust async
First, most programming is driven by fads. Second, my point was that if Rust waited more people would pan it for not having async.
Rust async was "rushed". It took years, but we still didn't get smooth experience out of it. Many pieces were missing.
It was rushed because many people wanted it, many developers were sick of having it in limbo, etc.
> Today, in safe rust, it is impossible to allocate a structure larger than the stack. Placement new is always just around the bend.
I don't follow Rust development too detailed nowadays, but if you are experiencing hardships, have you considered providing support to it? Either via money or time donations?
I understand complaining that some closed source company is prohibiting you from doing something, but this is an OSS project.
> As someone who used to really love Rust, this makes me quite sad.
The current async story is still an MVP and I too dislike it. In the months before async, the ecosystem seemed on halt, waiting for async to land on stable Rust. Since then nothing has changed. The ecosystem "degraded" noticeable and has not recovered since.
Maybe in future async will be great, but right now I try to avoid it.
Would you care to elaborate? There are some pain points that we're aware of, some of which we're actively working on, but there might be some you encountered that we don't know about and it would be helpful to find out about them so we can potentially address them in the future.
> I didn’t really want to write any graphics code, so here’s a way to cheat:
I wanted to try out Rust maybe a year ago, was thinking of writing a simple terminal app and found out that there was no way to do simple 2D graphics in Rust. Has the situation changed?
> What we have now is a circus. After 4 years of async being in stable.
I stopped really paying attention to Rust about 5 years ago, and am asking purely out of ignorance/curiosity, but has the community/leadership approach changed much since then? I remember async being the Shiny New Future that was talked about a lot back then, but it certainly seems like what's been added has not really done well?
Ah, yeah I had a vague memory that that was the case, which is why I asked.. I seem to recall it being removed, but I only follow Rust news, don't use it, so I wasn't sure of the reasons or implications.
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