esy VS rust-playground

As someone who wrote a fair amount of Rust and OCaml code, I have to agree with the author.

While working at Routine (YC W21), I was tasked with porting our core library to iOS to minimize code duplication. This was a lucky opportunity to write something resembling a compiler: it took in schemas described with our in-house data exchange library and generated C (for FFI) and Swift code (for the end-users, i.e., iOS developers).

Since Routine uses OCaml for everything (which was a big motivator for joining the company—I wanted to see how that would work out), I wrote it in OCaml. The end result is a 3-5k LOC project. It's by no means a full compiler, but it was lots of fun to write. The language got in the way incredibly rarely. On average, it made my life a lot easier.

We did encounter our fair share of issues, mostly due to the cross-compilation tooling (we initially used esy [1], flirted with Nix, and eventually switched to opam-cross-ios [2]), third-party libraries, and intricacies of FFI. Those do take their toll on sanity.

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

What's the current status of Esy? https://github.com/esy/esy

Any plans to backport its design back to Opam?

It's great to hear that Opam is making progress! I just wished that it would be more deeply integrated with Dune. A package manager that doesn't build is not very useful to be honest. Currently the only way to not have to care about switches and be able to clearly specify dependencies is to use the esy package manager[1] (which had lock files a while ago).

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

If you start a project today I would really try to use esy (https://esy.sh/)

I actually don’t use it myself but it seems to bring the modern programming language experience to OCaml

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "esy"

Alternatively, you can use esy.sh for a simpler setup/build process (it does not require running in a Cygwin shell).

Running esy does not work. Apparently, my environment does not know that it is there. Anyone know what is going on here? I have posted this in the discussion for esy@next here. I will get back to you all when I figure this out.

If you have an object that's !Unpin, then Miri will not apply uniqueness rules to anything containing it [0], including boxes and &mut references. (In the example code, replacing the PhantomPinned with a () will make Miri complain again.) This is considered a temporary (if long-lived) measure to allow async executors to manipulate pinned futures without invalidating all their references and whatnot. Thus, it might be seen as undetected UB, in lieu of a permanent solution.

[0] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

That would be true if you used `Vec::clear` too, it doesn't allocate a new vector. My point was that you still end up running Drop implementations with RepeatedField, just not all at once. See https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

That's a valid Unix path, but rust's quoting does nothing to stop it: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Self-referential structs work fine in Rust and always have.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

The compiler will correctly prevent you from moving the value.

The other way to have a struct that starts out as non-self-referential and then becomes self-referential can be achieved with `unsafe` and `Pin::new_unchecked`, which is how `async {}` is handled.

In rust as currently stands: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

On the other hand, both this wrapper and yours are counterproductive if the element size is dynamic (e.g. perhaps you're dealing with some nonsense like:)

    struct ITableColumn {

Overflow checks turn into two's compliments' wrapping, but that's only considered acceptable because bounds checks are not turned off.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...

I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds unnecessarily complicated and why I don't use Rust for any serious work.

This demonstrates the ABA problem in safe Rust: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Substitute the sleep with a combination of doing computation/work and the OS thread scheduler, and you can see how the bug surfaces.

You can also try Rust online using the Rust playground: https://play.rust-lang.org/

(Click ... beside build to get assembly) https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...

Unfortunately the go playground doesn't seem to support emitting assembly?