diesel VS Exercism - Scala Exercises

7. Diesel

Both seem nice. However, both of them rely very heavily on prepared statements. Unfortunately, using prepared statements is a no-go when you use connection poolers like pgbouncer, or in my case AWS RDS proxy. A discussion in Diesel indicates that disel is not going to provide any support for disabling prepared stements (https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel/discussions/3575), and a discussion on sqlx hints that disabling prepared statements is possible, but I haven't found any documentation or examples for it.

In addition we are experimenting with prebuild versions of diesel-cli that can be installed directly. We have a set of prebuilt binaries here. We are interested in feedback about how the provided binaries work on your platform.

First of all thanks for making this great tool. As it happens I currently toy around with using it for diesel-cli releases. See the WIP PR here. I think diesel-cli is a good example of a tool that depends on system libraries as it needs to link native database drivers, so this new release is welcome. Defining the dependencies seems to allow easily building things on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu and x86_64-apple-darwin. It seems to pick up everything in the right way there.

I did look at mysql initially. Then I started checking other crates. Diesel is an Object Relation Model (ORM), I'm not yet keen on taking on the complication of learning ORM, I give this crate a pass in the meantime.

I would recommend people look at diesel from Rust for how nice it could be. https://diesel.rs/ Look at the complex queries example. So much more readable and easier to understand.

Most wanted missing features in diesel

There are two problems with using Rust for web servers:

1. The only production-ready Rust web servers require writing async request handlers. Async Rust is not fun.

2. The only good Postgres client library is async: https://crates.io/crates/sqlx

I'm trying to remedy the first problem with https://crates.io/crates/servlin .

Solving the second problem will be another project. I hope someone else does it. There is https://crates.io/crates/diesel but it has the same problem as async Rust: incomprehensible compiler errors.

Lemmy is written in Rust using Actix Web and Diesel.rs.

https://actix.rs/

https://diesel.rs/

Exercism

Nice, this reminds me of Exercism, which I wish was more widely known since they seem to be good folks. (disclaimer, I donate to them)

https://exercism.org/

Exercism, the free programming learning platform has initiated a challenge named: 48in24.

Last year, Exercism put together the #12in23 challenge. The goal was to learn a new programming language each month throughout the year. I was one of 135 people who completed the challenge, and I learned a lot along the way!

The list of languages contains every language on Exercism, excluding ones that I've used before, web languages, or ones that I can't download for some reason.

You might like https://exercism.org/

Learning by doing, with the help of mentors. Excellent way to learn a next language (as you are already familiar with the programming concepts).

Exercism is pretty good for beginners with some programming language, they are open source and worth contributing to.

Exercism

> it might be more sustainable if courses were stored in a version controllable medium to facilitate multiple collaborators

My initial thought was to actually use GitHub to store the content. Either on Markdown or JSON - to have some version control. I like how Exercism [1] does it. But I thought it would be hard for teachers - unfamiliar with Git - to update lessons.

Then, I thought about implementing a version control system for the project but I felt I was overcomplicating things for an MVP. But I like the idea of having some kind of version control to improve collaboration.

[1] https://exercism.org/