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Comment by podiki | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if distros (on the maintainers side) really want to move to more Rust in such core pieces? But maybe, as the readme here suggests, this is more for non-Linux platforms?

I know in GNU Guix the more Rust is used has lead to struggles in packaging and building from source for non-x86-64 architectures (demands of building the Rust toolchain, bootstrapping), e.g. [0]. With something like librsvg [1] being a very low level dependency now, Rust has become rather integral to many parts, with any changes to these libraries requiring massive rebuilds for a source-based reproducible distro like GNU Guix.

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/r/guix-devel/2021-11/msg00197.html

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/librsvg

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I've contributed a few small bits to uutils and in the testing I did, on those few small bits, the performance case is pretty exciting. Much easier to do concurrency with rayon, etc.

I’ve spoken to my friend about this and why it’s so much faster, he said it could be done in c as well but rust is much easier to write. Pretty impressed with rust, I just heard many people insulting it at first, throwing around “memory safe” and it seemed like rust programmers were trying to ingress into established programs and there was a great deal of hatred for it.

I fell in love with the performance of rust CLI tools and mainly see its utility as a fast performing binary, memory safety is a bonus but if I had known about its performance earlier I would have ignored anti rust propaganda like quoting Linus saying “Nothing better than C”.

> he said it could be done in c as well but rust is much easier to write

This article is a good example

http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/09/28/the-relative-performa...

Thank you so much for this article, I knew benchmarks were usually nonsense in real world performance when I used it, but rust wasn't ever seen, and these real world implementations show that it really works well.

Yeah, the hate for this project is ridiculous. I'm not a professional programmer. I did it just for fun, because I wanted to learn Rust. Some of these tools need someone to fill out some basic functionality, and you probably use some of these tools everyday, so you already know the spec. (FWIW I'd recommend contributing to anyone who is looking for a basic Rust project. It has a very welcoming project leadership.)

And, yes, so-called "free concurrency" ended up being an incredible performance story, although, full disclosure, I/we were just able to use rayon in many places because Rust is just that composable.

Sorry if that came off as "hate" or being dismissive, did not intend it that way! Just genuinely curious given the difficulties I'm seeing on the distro side around Rust packaging, at least for Guix that goes from source in a reproducible/bootstrapable way (which seems very difficult beyond x86-64).

Oh, not at all! I'm sorry I gave that impression. I was referring to uutils, and, more particularly, some folks (GPL advocates) who are disappointed about the choice of license (MIT).

See, for example: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2757

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