Cargo VS rfcs

Dependency Management in Other Languages: We've discussed Python and Node.js in this article, but dependency management is a universal concept in programming. Exploring how you handle dependencies in other languages like Java, C#, or Rust could be beneficial. (I think Rust's cargo is an excellent example of a package manager.)

Nice hack! Would it have been possible back then to use cargo to pull in some dependencies?

The clean solution of cargo script is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12207

Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).

I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.

Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.

The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

--no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

You try to use it as a part of multi-language project, with an external build tool to tie it all together, and you discover that --out-dir flag is still not stabilized over some future compatibility concerns.

To create a new application we'll use cargo (a build tool and also a package manager for Rust. It is used for scaffolding new library/binary projects). So in your projects folder, you can run this command in your terminal:

> ...but at the end of the day Cargo is the reason that Rust is popular.

FWIW, maybe that's true for you, but there are numerous other advantages to the language for which many people choose to use Rust--some even "despite" Cargo: you see Google having had to put in way way WAY too much work to get Bazel working for Rust :/--that it honestly feels a bit like belittling an extremely important language to make this claim so flippantly.

> You can set a default build target for a Cargo project with two lines of configuration, no nightly features necessary...

This doesn't work as, as soon as you start setting target-specific options, it infects the host build, as they incorrectly modelled the problem as some kind of map from targets to flags. If you don't believe me, on your Linux computer, try cross-compile something complicated that will runs on a "least common denominator" Linux distribution, such as CentOS 7.

> Can you clarify what this is referring to?

Sure. I've Googled rust cargo target host bugs for you (which, FWIW, finds a number of bugs I've filed or have talked about, but it isn't as if I have a list anywhere). Note that one of these bugs is "closed", but I still provide them for context as a patch might have been merged but (as you'll find out if you read through all of these) it isn't stable.

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8147

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3349

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9322

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/9453

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9753

The result of this work being left incomplete is that increasingly large numbers of "serious" projects--things I'd expect people in packaging land to have heard of, such as BuildRoot--are being forced to set the ridiculous environment variable __CARGO_TEST_CHANNEL_OVERRIDE_DO_NOT_USE_THIS="nightly" in order to get access to a flag that makes Cargo sort of work.

(And yet, I often see people surprised at how long it is taking for various of the more important clients to fully get into using Rust, as the safety issues are so severe from continuing to use C/C++: as you made the contention that you believe the reason why people use Rust is Cargo, I will say the opposite: the reason why we don't see more Rust is also Cargo.)

What has worked for me so far:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

(do the exercises!)

plus a little bit of:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/

and

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.html

(There's no need to remember the last URL -- just google "rust xxx" and you will get the right page.)

I'm looking forward to reading this:

https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/introduction.html

Sprinkle some blog posts on top:

https://xxchan.me/cs/2023/02/17/optimize-rust-comptime-en.ht...

https://matklad.github.io/2021/05/31/how-to-test.html

https://matklad.github.io/2021/08/22/large-rust-workspaces.h...

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rus...

... and the rest is just a matter of applying enough sweat :)

RFC: Add large language models to Rust

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

Congrats!

> Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

> uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

> uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

This is great to see though!

I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

[4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

[5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

[6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469