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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Regarding Cargo.lock, the recommendation always was to include it in version control for application/binary crates, but not library ones. But tendencies changed over time to include it even for libraries. If a rust-toolchain file is tracked by version control, and is pinned to a specific stable release, then Cargo.lock should definitely be tracked too [1][2].

    It’s strictly more information tracked, so there is no logical reason not to include it. There was this concern about people not being aware of --locked not being the default behaviour of cargo install, giving a false sense of security/reliability/reproducibility. But “false sense” is never a good technical argument in my book.

    Anyway, your crate is an application/binary one. And if you were to not change the "*" dependency version requirement, then it is almost guaranteed that building your crate will break in the future without tracking Cargo.lock ;)






  • Next Day Edit: Sorry. Forgot to use my Canadian Aboriginal syllabics again. Because apparently it’s too hard to admit HTML-sanitizing source markdown was wrong!

    One thing that irks me in these articles is gauging the opinion of the “Rust community” through Reddit/HN/Lemmy😉/blogs… etc. I don’t think I’d be way off the mark when I say that these platforms mostly collectively reflect the thoughts of junior Rustaceans, or non-Rustaceans experimenting with Rust, with the latter being the loudest, especially if they are struggling with it!

    And I disagree with the argument that poor standard library support is the major issue, although I myself had that thought before. It’s definitely current lack of language features that do introduce some annoyances. I do agree however that implicit coloring is not the answer (or an answer I want to ever see).

    Take this simple code I was writing today. Ideally, I would have liked to write it in functional style:

        async fn some_fn(&self) -> OptionᐸMyResᐸVecu8ᐳᐳᐳ {
            (bool_cond).then(|| async {
                // ...
                // res_op1().await?;
                // res_op2().await?;
                // ...
                Ok(bytes)
            })
        }
    

    But this of course doesn’t work because of the opaque type of the async block. Is that a serious hurdle? Obviously, it’s not:

        async fn some_fn(&self) -> OptionᐸMyResᐸVecu8ᐳᐳᐳ {
            if !bool_cond {
                return None;
            }
    
            let res = || async {
                // ...
                // res_op1()?;
                // res_op2()?;
                // ...
                Ok(bytes)
            };
    
            Some(res().await)
        }
    

    And done. A productive Rustacean is hardly wasting time on this.

    Okay, bool::then() is not the best example. I’m just show-casing that it’s current language limitations, not stdlib ones, that are behind the odd async annoyance encountered. And the solution, I would argue, does not have to come in the form of implicit coloring.




  • Opendoas has a significantly smaller codebase. It only has 4397 lines of code compared to Sudo-rs’s staggering 35990 lines.

    Hmm.

    % tokei src | rg ' (Language|Total)'
     Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
     Total                  76        16243        13468          682         2093
    
    % tokei src test-framework | rg ' (Language|Total)'
     Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
     Total                 196        34274        27742         1072         5460
    
    % git grep '#\[cfg(test)\]' src |wc
         40      44    1387
    

    I too love making unaware “Tests Considered Harmful” arguments based on some blind analysis.

    Funnily enough, one could easily do some actually potentially useful shallow analysis, instead of a completely blind one, simply by noticing the libc crate dependency, then running:

    git grep -Enp -e libc:: --and --not -e '(libc::(c_|LOG)|\b(type|use)\b)'
    

    Ignoring the usage in test modules, use of raw libc appears to be more than you would think from the title. One can also argue that some of that usage would be better served by using rustix instead of raw libc.

    Of course authors can counter with arguments why using rustix* is not feasible or would complicate things, and would argue that the use of unsafe+libc is required for this kind of project, and it’s still reasonably limited and contained.

    And a little bit more informed back-and-forth discussion can go from there.

    * Searching for rustix in the sudo-rs repo returned this. So this predictably has been brought up before.





  • are there any hurdles or other good reasons to not just adding this to every create?

    I’m no expert. But my guess would be that many crate authors may simply not be aware of this feature. It wasn’t always there, and it’s still unstable. You would have to reach the “Unstable features” page of the rustdoc book to know about it.

    Or maybe some know about it, but don’t want to use an unstable feature, or are just waiting for it to possibly automatically work without any modifications.

    Of course, I would assume none of this applies to the embassy devs. That Cargo.toml file has a flavors field, which is something I’ve never seen before 😉 So, I’m assuming they are way more knowledgable (and up-to-date) about the Rust ecosystem than me.


  • So, this is being worked on. But for now, that crate needs this line in lib.rs

    #![cfg_attr(docsrs, feature(doc_auto_cfg))]
    

    And this line in Cargo.toml’s [package.metadata.docs.rs] section:

    rustdoc-args = ["--cfg", "docsrs"]
    

    With these changes, feature gating will be displayed in the docs.

    To replicate this locally:

    RUSTDOCFLAGS='--cfg docsrs' cargo doc --features=nightly,defmt,pender-callback,arch-cortex-m,executor-thread,executor-interrupt
    

  • I constantly seem to include something from the docs, only to be told by the compiler that it does not exist, and then I have to open the source for the create to figure out if it’s hidden behind a feature flag.

    As others mentioned, the situation is not perfect. And you may need to check Cargo.toml. Maybe even the source.

    But as for the quoted part above, the docs should definitely indicate if a part of the API is behind a feature. Let’s take rustix as an example.

    Here is the module list:

    Here is the view from inside a module:

    Here is the view from a function page:

    This is also true for platform support. Take this extension trait from std:

    Now, it’s true that one could be navigating to method docs in the middle of a long doc page, where those indicators at the top may be missed. But that’s a UI issue. And it could be argued that repeating those indicators over and over would introduce too much clutter.


  • Note: the ᐸᐳ characters used below are Canadian Aboriginal syllabics because Lemmy devs haven’t fixed broken input sanitization yet.


    Well, getters are not an official concept in Rust. You can do whatever works best in your case.

    Just worth pointing out that a method with a return value of OptionVecStringᐳᐳ wouldn’t be really a getter, as you must be constructing values, or moving ownership, or cloning. None of these actions conceptually belong to a getter.

    Also, you should be clear on the what the Option abstraction means. Does it mean the vector is empty? Does it mean the vector does not exist or some sort of null (FFI ore serialization contexts)? And make sure the code does what you expect it to do.


  • Note: the ᐸᐳ characters used below are Canadian Aboriginal syllabics because Lemmy devs haven’t fixed broken input sanitization yet.


    A vec and a string are basically the same thing (a series of bytes)

    Everything is a series of bytes! I thought you were going to mention that both are fat pointers. But that “series of bytes” description is quite weird.

    This makes handling it much easier because you can still iterate over it

    This is not a valid consideration/objection, as Options are iterable and you can flatten them:

    fn main() {
      let v = vec![1,2,3];
      for n in Some(&v).into_iter().flatten() {
        eprintln!("{n}");
      }
      for n in None::ᐸ&Veci32ᐳᐳ.into_iter().flatten() {
        eprintln!("{n}");
      }
    }
    

    This might involve the compiler making an allocation of an empty array but most of them (gcc, ghc) will now what you are doing and optimize the null check on the empty array to a bool check

    This paragraph appears to be out of place in the context of a Rust discussion.