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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit worried when a language develops a "platform" and an "ecosystem". This usually means you need to bring in a large amount of vaguely relevant stuff to do anything. It adds another layer of cruft, and more dependencies.

Write standalone tools, but don't create a "platform". Don't make the use of the language dependent on your tools.

C++ does not have a "platform". Nor does it need one.

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C++ has innumerable de facto "platforms" and "ecosystems". You have to choose one to get anything done, whether that be various Boost libraries, POSIX, Win32, Cocoa, Qt, GTK(mm), even stuff like XPCOM…

Helpfully, many of these platforms reinvent basic things like strings [1] and reference counted smart pointers [2] in incompatible ways.

Wouldn't it be better if there were just one platform?

[1]: http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qstring.html

[2]: http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/qshareddatapointer.html

Some languages have also seen great success with having a standard platform but still allowing users to replace it as needed. The many Haskell Preludes and Jane Street's ocaml core are two such examples.

I think the ability to opt out of the rust-platform metapackage is a great feature.

And notably, C++11 actually moves in this direction, standardizing things like smart pointers [0][1]. It's a very smart move for Rust. Core or near-core library wars in the early days of adoption of a language leads to duplication of effort, and for those invested in seeing Rust gain a set of libraries to rival other languages, this is a great thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B11#C.2B.2B_standard_lib...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_pointer#unique_ptr

Actually, C++'s STL is in a weird situation, compared to the standard library in other languages, because the STL is a spec, not an implementation. And there are as many implementations of the STL as there are compilers. This might arguably happen if there were multiple Rust compilers, though. Anyways, the result on the C++ STL is that in many cases, the same types have different performance characteristics on different platforms, or worse, different behavior/bugs.

Nit: C++ Standard Library != STL

>You have to choose one to get anything done

I work on multiple medium-sized projects that disagree. If you're not writing GUI code, it's quite possible to write 99% platform agnostic code without the help of a 3rd standard library supplement, especially with C++11.

It's possible, yes. But (a) large pre-existing industry codebases make use of their legacy libraries that predate "modern C++"; (b) that directly contradicts the parent poster's point, in that you're saying that having a standard platform is a benefit.

We already have `std` for that. The point of a "Rust platform" is that you can have confidence that the libraries you are using are of decent quality, reasonable popularity, and will be maintained.

I get the feeling that you didn't really read the post. Nothing in the platform is required to use Rust, and you can trivially write Rust packages that don't use the platform. The point of the platform is for convenience. In most cases it will make sense to use it because it provides a convenient set of libraries that are known to work well together, but you could also choose to just ignore the Rust platform entirely and continue to use Rust the same way we've been using it up to now.

"In general, rustup is intended to be the primary mechanism for distribution; it’s expected that it will soon replace the guts of our official installers, becoming the primary way to acquire the Rust Platform and all that comes with it."

Then, of course, the other installers will gradually break and be abandoned. The effect is that users must run the "Rust Platform", unless they have the resources to build their own distro.

Is there a monetization scheme behind this? Does someone aspire to be the Canonical of the Rust ecosystem?

I don't see anything in this proposal which indicates that rustup would by default install any of this, and it's already the primary target of development efforts, Rust Platform or not.

What other installers are you referring to, exactly? The old rustup.sh which couldn't support multiple toolchains installed alongside each other? multirust which didn't work on Windows? rustup is a massive improvement over both, IMO.

Rustup being the mechanism to install the Rust Platform does not mean that installing the Rust Platform is required to use Rustup. Rustup is an existing tool that installs Rust for you, and it's highly likely that you'll be able to use it in the future to install just Rust or to install the whole Rust Platform at your discretion.

> Is there a monetization scheme behind this? Does someone aspire to be the Canonical of the Rust ecosystem?

This seems like a complete non-sequitur. I have no idea what you're trying to suggest here.

I'm sorry, but this is incoherent FUD. Do you expect the Rust project to maintain multiple installers? Why? What does this have to do with monetization?

> Is there a monetization scheme behind this? Does someone aspire to be the Canonical of the Rust ecosystem?

Of course not. Spreading conspiracy theories isn't appreciated.

Go watch recent talks by Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup--they both lament the fact that C++ never developed as strong a standard library as Python, etc. With C++14 and beyond the C++ working committee is actively trying to make the language and libraries more complete and comparable to larger libraries out there.

In a low-level language like C there's _never_ a right solution out of the box. Instead, you use the language because it permits you to tailor the solution to the problem.

In a high-level language like Python there's always a right solution. It's just rarely well-tailored to the problem.

I'm not at all surprised C++ is still muddling around in the middle somewhere.

In C is called UNIX and it got renamed as POSIX for other OSes.

Qt / Boost / .net are C++ platforms. The difference is you can choose one or none, and the OP actually explicitly talks about how important it is not to have one absolute blessed platform like Java has.

When I was developing KDE applications, I refered to my programming language as "C++/Qt".

> C++ does not have a "platform". Nor does it need one.

Sure it does, it is called C++ Standard Library and ISO C++ catching up to what other languages already offer.

https://isocpp.org/std/status

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