rfcs VS xshell

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 shares Go's "errors as values + panics" philosophy. Rust also has a standard library API for catching panics. Its addition was controversial, but there are two major cases that were specifically enumerated as reasons to add this API: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1236-stab...

> It is currently defined as undefined behavior to have a Rust program panic across an FFI boundary. For example if C calls into Rust and Rust panics, then this is undefined behavior. Being able to catch a panic will allow writing C APIs in Rust that do not risk aborting the process they are embedded into.

> Abstractions like thread pools want to catch the panics of tasks being run instead of having the thread torn down (and having to spawn a new thread).

The latter has a few other similar examples, like say, a web server that wants to protect against user code bringing the entire system down.

That said, for various reasons, you don't see catch_unwind used in Rust very often. These are very limited cases.

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

Mara's blog post also describes the benefits of standardizing Rust.

Since she created the RFC for standardizing Rust (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355) and is also on the team that is working on Rust standardization (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio...), I think she was making the point that Rust has good controls in place for adding features while compatibility, not that "Rust does not need a standard".

If she really believed that Rust does not need a standard, why would she create the RFC and join the team working on the effort?

Rust is a great language. There is no reason why it should not have a standard to better formalize its requirements and behaviors.

Just a few minutes ago I learned about https://github.com/matklad/xshell and it looks nice!

For developer-oriented stuff, there's tools like xshell and cargo-xtask. For operator tasks that need to run in a deployed environment, it's not usually a big lift to add CLI subcommands to your binary. It's certainly more boilerplate and inertia than doing stuff in a live REPL, though, and sometimes difficult to recommend for truly one-off situations.

2) xshell makes the common tasks of shelling out to other processes and massaging file system simpler

how was your experience with trying to use [xshell](https://github.com/matklad/xshell/) as a shell script replacement? was the boilerplate worth it?

Also xshell might be helpful here https://github.com/matklad/xshell

* time to compile whatever syn generated

I didn’t do a super thorough studies of things, but my impression is that 2, performance of syn itself, is rarely an issue. Most of the time it is 1) (and the associated problem of decreased build parallelism because half of the crates wait for syn to compile) and 3).

To get a feeling how costly a simple proc macro is, run this benchmark: https://github.com/matklad/xshell/blob/4e5090e9f79baeed1037b....

This is an API vulnerable to shell injection. I think it’s relatively important to design command-running libraries which don’t re-introduce the possibility of this error into Rust. The fix here is to ensure that the string is a compile-time string, and, preferably, even lex it at compile time. See xshell for an example of ergonomic and safe API here: https://github.com/matklad/xshell.

Note that “lexer level” proc macros, which don’t parse rust code, and which don’t generate a ton of Rust code, could be pretty light weight on compile times. Here’s a benchmark one can run to measure that: https://github.com/matklad/xshell/blob/master/tests/it/main.rs#L376