Since it is a somewhat "thin" wrapper around curl, are there deep reasons for it to be written in Rust as opposed to, say, C or posix shell? Was learning Rust one of the main goals of this project? (not that there would be anything wrong with that, just asking).
> Precompiled binary is available at hurl-1.3.1-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/releases/download/...
> For Debian / Ubuntu, Hurl can be installed using a binary .deb file provided in each Hurl release.
> hurl-bin package for Arch Linux and derived distros.
> An installer is available at hurl-1.3.1-win64-installer.exe
Just glancing at a few files, main.rs is already over 500 lines, which means shell would be impractical. C is a very difficult language to learn and to use correctly, so in the long-term there will be more Rust (and Go, and Python) programmers than C programmers. I think that is a good reason for projects to choose other languages.
In fact, one might equally ask why it wasn't written in Python - Python is safer than C, far easier, and performance doesn't sound critical for an HTTP debugger meant to be used interactively by a human.
We're probably already far past the point of "There are more competent Python programmers than competent C programmers."
Maybe this is the point where we need to start thinking about where we went wrong? I know that nobody cares about performance anymore, but if anybody is really thinking about Python as a replacement for C then that makes me sad.
C is also a lot harder than Python to learn.
So for these reasons there are more Python programmers than C programmers.
For some subset of problems for which C is a good tool, Rust is a good alternative, arguably with less foot guns. For some other problems that are solved with C, Golang is a good alternative.
So in the end C is losing marketshare because of all these reasons.
- we're a 30 developper team with Linux, Windows and macOs computers. Installing Hurl with Python on Windows boxes was always a challenge and the single drop Rust binary has been a relief for us,
- in a CI, we really want to run tests as fast as possible. The Rust version (the actual one) seems a lot faster that our Python prototype (certainly due to our lack of optimisation in our Python code)
The process would be:
- Run the `curl | bash` command from https://rustup.rs/ to install rust via rustup
- If you have a non-standard shell configuration that rustup can't detect, then add `~/.cargo/bin` to your PATH.
- Clone the git repository containing the program you wish to compile
- Run `cargo build --release` in the source directory.
That's it, and that will work across all major platforms and almost all Rust programs.
rustup: unrecognized OS type: OpenBSD
Relating to the choice of Rust, we think that it is the best language for this type of command-line tool. Performant like C/C++, but way safer to develop. And using native existing libs such as libcurl is possible.