Bzip2 in Rust: porting the randomization table | Hacker News Reader

Bzip2 in Rust: porting the randomization table

people.gnome.org

7 pointskaeso9 comments

"See the commit for the corresponding extern declarations in bzlib_private.h. With those functions and the table ported to Rust, we can remove randtable.c. Yay!"

You just made bzip2 artificially depend on Rust. I have no Rust compiler on Solaris 10, which means that with this commit I can no longer compile your code. This goes for any other OS which doesn't have Rust.

Introducing a Rust dependency isn’t accidental when it’s the point of the whole enterprise.

The author is also keeping the C version around. bzip2 didn’t even have version control before this. The C version will live on for all those who require it.

Why purposely replace something which needs no replacing?

We are such a horrible, horrid industry. This is a perfect example why that is so.

See here: https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/maintaining-bzip2.ht...

A project that was not maintained now has a maintainer. Patches will actually be applied centrally. Distros won’t need to maintain their own forks.

A maintainer who will convert bzip2 to Rust, where the rest of us who aren't sold on the new religion won't be able to run it, because the priests of the new religion don't give a flying pterodactyl about any operating system which isn't GNU/Linux and maybe Windows. Oh, and up until now I could fix bzip2 because it is written in C and I could actually understand the code and fix it. Now if by some miracle I even had a Rust compiler, the "maintainer" would indirectly force me to learn Rust, because of course I should spend days chained in front of a computer rather than having a life, learning yet another fashion fad, extremely horribly put together mishmash of an object oriented programing langauge (if you have methods, you are object-oriented, no excuses will work with me).

We are such a horrid industry. Information technology is going deeper and deeper down the drain amidst trend pandering and wheel re-invention. If I could get out I would yesterday. It's a sad day when a computer enthusiast with a formal education in computer science like me is brought down to that.

Again, please read more details about what you’re talking about, or even my previous comments. The C version isn’t going anywhere.

That's what you claim, but I've no reason to believe it will stay that way, especially since the new maintainer wants to "rustify" it.

I'm repeating what the maintainer himself has said.

You're letting your bias get in the way of actual facts.

And why do I have that bias?

Moreover, the new maintainer write his goal is to "rustify". What more proof do you need?

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