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Comment by mises | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody tell me what is behind the recent rewrite-all-the-things-in-rust craze? I get it can have some benefits in terms of security, but it seems rewriting so many things in it just for the sake of it is a bit excessive.

I understand some of these are very likely for educational purposes (like this one and others; it's good for getting more familiar with the language), but it still seems to be a bit of a strange trend (especially since people who don't need to learn are doing it, seemingly just because "yay rust").

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Rewriting existing software in a new language is one of the best ways to learn a language.

> especially since people who don't need to learn are doing it

Don't need to learn?? There's always something to learn.

I support RIIR 100%. It’s much easier for me to contribute to Rust projects. It’s not just the language (but that is definitely a part). I don’t need to worry about shit like “how do I build this project” or "my code might run on platforms x and y but I'm not sure about platform z". With c/cpp, the build process can be potentially very complicated. Missing headers, missing binaries. With Rust, I just run “cargo build”.

Furthermore, the resulting code feels just so sturdy. I can also expose it as C and it can be used from the likes of Python.

> With Rust, I just run “cargo build”.

The value of simple things like this is immensely underestimated.

Yeah, I just spent a couple hours configuring CMake when I was porting a Windows app to Linux, and it was a pain tracking down all of the dependencies. I had a similar app in Rust that worked with a `cargo build` out of the box (actually, my friend rewrote my Rust version to C++ because I was lax in updating it).

Say what you want about Rust v C/C++, but you cannot tell me that Rust's build process isn't easy. In fact, building for other platforms is pretty trivial, just `rustup add <target>` or wherever and you can target pretty much any common platform and many uncommon ones, and those targets will get updated with everything else. In fact, it's so nice that I have to convince myself to not use it as the way to distribute CLI apps (`cargo install <tool>`).

I scrolled down for this comment.

Actually there's a lot of great reasons to rewrite everything in every language. Git is an especially good piece of software to implement everywhere because it's relatively stable and it's pretty useful.

As for actual reasons, one good example is so you can keep your dependencies in the language, using the language package manager. For Go nobody even questions that this is worth it; it enables painless cross compiling and completely static, libc-free binaries. For Rust that may not be a thing, but you do at least get the benefits that you could integrate Git functionality without having to hack around in porcelain.

This one here is a learning experience by it's own description, but I would suggest people stop complaining about "rewriting everything" in $LANGUAGE. The opposite complaint is often cited as a reason why to not use the language (that, for example, basic programs haven't already been ported.) If we did build an alternate world with feature parity, unit testing, optimizations, in a memory safe language, I doubt many people would be complaining about the strange trend of rewriting things anymore.

That's a good point; you're right that it's helpful to be able to interface with such a ubiquitous program natively in a language of choice. I did see a mention on the page of deploying as a crate and using in another program; that seems very convenient.

> stop complaining

Not a complaint; more a question as to why there's a specific move around rust. I appreciate the reply; that's exactly the kind of response I was looking for.

Fair enough. There's definitely a lot of folks who do get upset over this stuff, maybe as pushback to the new language hype.

There are bindings to git in Rust (https://github.com/rust-lang/git2-rs ) - I've used it in a couple of my projects (https://github.com/samsieber/subgit-sync for example).

That said, even when using those bindings, I've had to drop down to wrapping the porcelain sometimes. I'd love to have a native rust git implementation. It'd be easier to hack on, and to abuse for the type of git interactions I've written.

And it'd be one less external dependency to worry about when cross-compiling. I love how easy it is to install things from source in Rust - and it's pretty easy to add flag to make the program use your CPU's special instruction set to make it even faster.

Also, it would be pretty sweet to use git with Redox, and I don't think Redox works very well with things not written in Rust.

Redox can run a lot of non-Rust software, see https://www.redox-os.org/news/release-0.5.0/ a list of packages that work.

In addition to what has already been said, I think there's a lot of interest in reimplementing command line tools in Rust because there are a lot of useful support libraries for TUI development. Because of the lower barrier of entry (no fussing with build/linker issues to use convenience libraries) you're seeing an increase in people trying things just to try them.

For me, dealing with something written in Rust is less painful than dealing with something with bindings for Rust, and honestly I'd consider rewriting something for that reason. And that's the case for nearly any language.

For example, I rewrote `tar` in JavaScript because I wanted to use it in the browser, and I didn't want to fiddle with trying to compile the existing project to JS. It took me a weekend and it worked pretty well for the project I needed it for. That project has since died (completely redesigned), but the tar stuff still works.

These days I'm getting lazy, so for something like git, I'll often exec out to the CLI app instead of fiddling with bindings, especially if it's not a performance-critical part of my app. However, I'd definitely look for a rewrite first and clean bindings second to use as a lib, especially if the rewrite had a suitable license (anything not copyleft).

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