nix VS changie

If we drop std Rust ceases to be economical due to the time it would take to reimplement the data structures and IO interfaces it provides, not to mention the event loop crate we use (calloop). At that point we'd be relying on so much FFI via eg. nix that the relative safety would be diminished too. After reimplementing all that it's not clear to me that we'd even save that much size, but I suppose it's possible.

Now that we have covered the fundamentals of signals, let's delve into the world of handling signals in Rust! Unlike C, where signal handling is built into the language modules, Rust provides several libraries that enable developers to handle signals with ease. Libraries such as signal_hook, nix, libc, and tokio handle signals that primarily use C bindings to make it possible to work with signals.

Obviously you meant the nix crate

Finally, there's the nix crate, which provides a safe Rust API over the libc functions.

You can take a look here for example: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Unsafe code can in principle speed up I/O by calling libc for special syscalls, but uutils typically uses safe wrappers from nix instead. Very rarely there's a line of unsafe code needed to sand off the edges.

This post fails to speak to me on two fronts:

* The `nix` crate is a cornerstone of the Rust development ecosystem: if you do anything that requires POSIX or various nix-specific APIs beyond those wrapped by the standard library, then `nix` most likely provides a high-level and safe* wrapper for them. Perfectionism is a virtue in this context, one that keeps large parts of the Rust ecosystem from accidentally consuming buggy code. The author unfortunately chose a particularly messy and bug-prone corner of the POSIX APIs to wrap, and ran into a correspondingly intensive review process. I've merged simpler wrappers[1][2] with no fuss.

* Alacritty seems to work just fine. I switched to it about two months ago, after using nothing but (heavily customized) rxvt-unicode for a decade. Maybe it's because I don't use ligatures or images in my terminals (I thought we were talking about non-"toy" functionality!), but I haven't found myself wanting for anything beyond what Alacritty already does. And the scrollback seems to work nicely. To summarize: where's the tragedy?

[1]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1342

[2]: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1331

One thing I'd like to see is a MSRV policy, as its causing problems for downstreams (https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/issues/1555)

That is all for now. Reach me on twitter @miniScruffDev or by starting a discussion on GitHub.

Yes, there is changie - a golang tool that inspired me actually.

The complete source for this generation is here in gen.go and might help anyone else who wants to implement there own docs from code.

A short example is the one from Changie itself that asks for an issue number and adds a link when formatting. Changie's .changie.yaml is basically the default configuration with the issue choice added.

That is all for now. Reach me on twitter @miniScruffDev or by starting a discussion on GitHub.

I tend to create a package or file for handling configs with a load or init method depending on how it is loaded ( yaml or env vars ). Here is a bigger example for my own CLI tool Changie https://github.com/miniscruff/changie/blob/main/core/config.go.