Hacker News Reader

Comment by riskable | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. It's exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for as a means to bridge the gap between web libraries that want to own the mio::poll::poll() loop (providing no access to register listeners of your own) and rolling literally everything myself. It's a BIG gap!

I was just about to start writing the equivalent of rotor as a thin plugin you can tack on to a mio event loop alongside whatever but with this I think I can get away with simply starting an event loop ahead of time and passing events back into my web app. It'll be interesting to play with it.

View on HN

I just started diving more into Rust recently and have been trying to understand the current state of the ecosystem. I've been looking at a bunch of the libraries that expand upon mio, but this is the first time I've heard of `rotor`. Besides searching crates.io and judging based on the download numbers, is there better way to discover important crates?

> I've been looking at a bunch of the libraries that expand upon mio, but this is the first time I've heard of `rotor`.

The current state of affairs is somewhat up in the air because Alex Crichton (futures) and Carl Lerche (mio) are working on the Tokio project [0][1], which is likely to become the most favored way to do things on top of mio.

[0] https://github.com/tokio-rs/ [1] https://medium.com/@carllerche/announcing-tokio-df6bb4ddb34

I just want to add that I really like where Tokio is going. The architecture seems well-thought-out and exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. There's only one problem though...

It's still under construction!

Every day something new breaks, haha. Whether it's tokio-middleware with the "what was I thinking?" patch:

https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio-middleware/commit/78210757...

(seriously, click that link it's funny)

...or today's fun:

https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio-minihttp/issues/12

The good news though is that it is obviously being worked on--heavily. The Rust ecosystem is so new that it feels a bit like we're in the Wild West. Someone comes up with a decent way to do something and then after a bit of ecosystem evolution we're back to the drawing board since, "there's a better way."

This is all very good because it means that the Rust ecosystem is evolving rapidly. It also means that developers are productive enough in the language that entire frameworks can be re-written from scratch in a reasonably short amount of time. I think it's a good demonstration of how effective the language is overall at its goal of improving productivity (as far as systems programming languages go).

> The Rust ecosystem is so new that it feels a bit like we're in the Wild West.

This is pretty normal for an ecosystem at Rust's stage of development. Ecosystem development is always something of a monkeys-on-typewriters effect and if you continuously have major disruptions in the language, you wind up with Javascript Fatigue.

What I'm particularly impressed with in Rust is the core team's leadership. I'm looking forward to Tokio because I think it's likely to have Rails-like dominance over the ecosystem. This is exciting because it gets us monkeys all pointed in the same direction instead of writing another postgresql client because existing ones don't support the current flavor of event loop that I'm using. Getting to the point where we can snap a bunch of pieces together and have a network service is huge for office advocacy. I think it was a key factor in Ruby's wins over the more established Python web community when observing from the Python side.

I'm also pleased that the Rust core team is focused on my pet areas of improvement: editor support, impl Trait, and async network services.

I'm one of the persons waiting for a stable tokio so badly. I have many use cases for this in my Rust projects that are either currently doing async io so-so or doing stuff like firing http requests in sync using the tools available. The situation in hyper land is not very cool at the moment, master being async but requiring you to write the callbacks, stable using too old openssl and the tokio branch not compiling.

With tokio I could unify my code base and make the code simpler and easier to follow.

Discovery and curation of crates is one of the near-term goals of the Rust team. At least they said as much at RustConf.

Until better solution is introduced by Rust core team, the Awesome Rust initiative is probably next best thing

Agreed, Awesome Rust is a great resource. Here's the link: https://github.com/kud1ing/awesome-rust

There are also some "Are we X yet?" sites that cover ecosystem maturity for specific topics. Here are all the Rust-specific sites linked from Mozilla's page (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet):

Web Programming - http://www.arewewebyet.org/

Concurrency - http://areweconcurrentyet.com/

IDE/Editor Support - https://areweideyet.com/

Machine Learning - http://www.arewelearningyet.com/

Game Development - http://arewegameyet.com/

Thank you. All feedbacks are very welcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com