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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Just reading the "abstract", this sounds way more complicated than anyone needs a VCS to be. I also question the "mathematically sound" bit - the "commutative changes/diff" thing sounds really far fetched.

Also, the fact it is written in rust means nothing to me. The whole "but rust doesn't segfault!" thing is, and has always been, a ridiculous reason why rust is somehow inherently better suited for such projects. The article keeps leaning on that fact as though it makes the project superior somehow, but it just feels like grandstanding.

The architecture section is just buzzwords. It doesn't explain the technical aspects, it doesn't allow me to understand the system, and then I'm immediately dropped into "how to use the CLI". But wait, you haven't sold me yet.

This was painful to read.

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I don't read it like that at all. Rust is mentioned only once. Nevertheless I do care if a tool I am considering to use is written in JavaScript, Rust or some esoteric language. It means a lot, not only for "safety" which is not important to you that much, but also for maintainability, community, and the future of the project. Of course, what triggers you probably is mentioning Rust in the title of the post. Still hard to imagine being so annoyed by it–if authors thinks it's important or it will grab attention, why not use it...

We might not have read the same article.

> Also, the fact it is written in rust means nothing to me.

I'm one of the authors of Pijul, and the author of that post asked me a few questions when preparing that post, and that is addressed there: https://initialcommit.com/blog/pijul-creator (see "Why did you choose to write Pijul in Rust?").

> It doesn't explain the technical aspects, it doesn't allow me to understand the system

You can have plenty of that there: https://pijul.org/manual/theory.html.

> This was painful to read.

I strongly disagree. Explaining the goals of this project isn't always easy, because both large complex projects and complete beginners can benefit from using a rigorous mathematical modeling. I guess this blog post leans more towards the "beginners" side, whereas the "Theory" page linked above would be more appealing to power users. Both are useful and important, they just appeal to different people.

The Rust part I think is meaningful. It means we can (with reasonable probability) expect the software to be fast and lightweight in terms of memory usage, and it means it’s probably a lot easier for new contributors to jump in than an equivalent C or C++ codebase. That last bit is about a lot more than memory safety. Rust is basically designed from the ground up to make it relatively easy to onboard a new engineer safely onto a project in comparison to legacy systems languages.

And abandoned quite quickly, like most Rust projects.

> And abandoned quite quickly, like most projects.

Amended your statement slightly. If anything, there's a fairly high incidence of successful projects coming out of the Rust world.

Honestly as long as it's not written in JavaScript (I like not having npm and node on my machine) or C (not abstract enough) I'm happy to use it. For small tool at least.

> Just reading the "abstract", this sounds way more complicated than anyone needs a VCS to be. I also question the "mathematically sound" bit - the "commutative changes/diff" thing sounds really far fetched.

Care to say anything more quantitative and less feel-y? Because you're refuting pretty much the entire premise of pijul (which clearly exists, works, and has been somewhat rigorously designed) with nothing but adjectives. So having a concrete counterpoint would be helpful because pijul is just sitting there with very concrete counterpoints to your entire comment :)

Yes, but it is written in Rust.

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