oso VS too-many-lists

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Not OP but Authentication is easy, authorization is a cross-cutting concern that often requires custom code. E.g., there are people and teams, both of which can have different kinds of access to something (read/write). Sometimes teams have sub-teams. Do the sub-teams have access to the parent teams' resources and/or vice versa? Also what kind of sharing are you going to support? Do people have to have an account to view stuff shared to them or can you just send a link? There are some efforts to make custom DSLs for describing authorization policies, to avoid cross-cutting code[1].

Computed fields require different treatment at every level of the stack. This isn't inherently hard, but it is an extra feature these low-code/no-code platforms need. Where things get difficult is inn migrations. It's common for a field that is computed at the beginning to become customizable, or for the computation to change. When that happens, what should the value be for old columns? Computed fields also often pull data from multiple other tables, which may require some combination of custom queries and database optimization.

[1] https://github.com/osohq/oso

Oso and OpenFGA are two alternatives that implement Zanzibar-style authorisation.

There's Oso as well

Well this was fun to see! I'm the CTO of Oso, where we're building Polar (the second of the links mentioned https://docs.osohq.com/).

I have a few really minor nitpicks, so will try and make up for it by adding to the discussion :)

First of all, it doesn't really make sense to talk about Datalog as a good language for authorization, because much like with Prolog there doesn't really exist a single implementation of it. OPA's language Rego is a datalog variant, and Polar started out as a Prolog variant (although it's not really recognisable as one any more).

And that's an important point because otherwise it would be pretty reasonable to decide that: logic programming is good for authorization => you should go find the most battle-tested language out there and use that. For example, there's SWI Prolog [1] and Scryer Prolog [2] as two of my favourites.

To me, the thing that is mind-blowing about logic programming, is (a) how powerful the paradigm is, and (b) how concisely you can implement a logic programming language. Take miniKanren [3] which is a full-blown logic language in a few hundred lines of code.

In my mind, the original article makes a decent case that logic programming is a good fit for authorization. And just generally I love anyone bringing attention to that :)

But to me, the reason logic programming is such a solid foundation for authorization logic is the pieces you can build on top of it. For Polar, we've added:

- Types! So you can write authorization logic over your data types and help structure your logic. We've implemented this by simply adding an additional operator into the language that can check types

First time hearing about rhai, but there's a project in that space called Oso that's authored in Rust and uses a different DSL than Rego. You may or may not find it appealing.

Authentication is probably the aspect of it that's the weakest. Authorization has a few nice libs, with Oso probably being the nicest, but authentication is mostly roll your own from what I've seen.

> Hopefully Oso open source their library.

https://github.com/osohq/oso seems to have the core, C FFI, and language bindings.

Thanks! PHP is a highly requested language for us and we've been rolling them out based on demand. You can vote for it if you want here https://github.com/osohq/oso/issues/791

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Second, once you've finished something introductory like The Book, read Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It really helped me to understand what ownership and borrowing actually mean in practical terms. If you don't mind paying for learning materials, a lot of people recommend Programming Rust, Second Edition by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall as either a complement, follow-up, or alternative to The Book.

Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists which highlights a lot of the differences with how you need to structure your code in Rust compared to other languages.