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Comment by matricaria | Hacker News Reader

What are the benefits of „Written in Rust“ here? As far as I understand this is basically a GUI for FFMPEG, which is written in C. Is it just marketing?

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There seems to be a trend of people building frontends to already existing tools, then advertising their software as though it was itself implementing the underlying functionality.

You built this?

...

I built this.

Considering the original tool was abandoned, I think its fair game. They also noted they made some improvements over the original tool. I assume the author wanted a simple tool like the original but found some bugs, dug into the code, realized he could re-write it in what he was comfortable in.

When was FFMpeg ever abandoned?

What? I'm talking specifically about the GUI itself.

...which is a frontend to FFMpeg's functionality, not a screen recorder in its own right.

Right, and GUIs dont have GUI specific bugs ever? Thats what you seem to be implying, or the underlying dependency becomes incompatible.

"Written in Rust" grants +4 trustworthiness, +4 ability to write a blog post on memory safety and 2% resistance to ego loss at the cost of -5 alertness and -3 O.G. street cred points

People always say this, and I get it - maybe it feels like an attempt to ride a hype train.

But if you're interested in Rust ecosystem, you're probably interested in how someone wraps FFMPEG in rust, and so that tag might be valuable. Maybe we can tag projects based on languages, and help avoid this.

Isn’t that already a thing? Or do you mean that HN should add tags for posts about languages?

Someone (may have been Julia Evans) discussed how easier it is to hit the front page if you add "in xxx" to your title.

"xxx" being the current hyped technology. She mentioned Go and Rust as examples

In Scratch

I opened to project to take a look at the source code, which I would not have done if the project were written in, say, C.

Same - it seems like a decent, small, example of using gtk4 bindings in rust. These kinds of projects are great particularly for anyone comfortable in C and building up fluency in rust.

Also might be easier to build than a C project.

Yeah but the majority of the useful functionality of the program is written in C (gtk4, ffmpeg).

It just seems descriptive, I don't think there's any implication of a particular benefit. More description = more reason to click on link.

The benefits of "written in Rust" are that it never segfaults.

Wrapping C in Rust gives no such guarantee. FFmpg can segfault.

Yes but as more stuff is written in Rust, we'll have fewer segfaults.

...only if rustc itself remains bug free

And the unsafe parts of... Numerous crates and even the stdlib

I thought your original post was a joke? "Never" is an exaggeration, and overselling Rust like that makes people think it's just hype.

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