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Comment by denysvitali | Hacker News Reader

I like the initiative, but all this effort for ... unsafe Rust? I know it's a hot topic, and I hope the end goal is to have a memory-safe (and faster) tmux. I just hope the author doesn't stop here :)

Edit: As pointed out below, I'm stupid, it's stated in the article and I didn't read that part

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It's the first step in a two-step process:

    1. Rewrite in (unsafe) Rust.
    2. Update the code over time, moving towards safe Rust.

It's the old, "get it working then fix it" process. In business that's normally a bad idea because you end up wasting more time than if you'd just done things correctly from the start but for a hobby project it's fine. Because then you're more likely to learn something and possibly—ultimately—end up with a better end product.

To a business, time your developers spend learning things (the hard way) is wasted.

To a hobbyist, taking the time to learn things is time well-spent.

In business it can also be a good idea, because if you're waiting for it to be done correctly you may never have a delivered product even if you have a working (but not 100% ideal) product. A compromise is to get a subset of your target capabilities working correctly and the rest unimplemented and deliver that before continuing on.

At the end of the article he states that the next step is to work toward safe Rust.

Thank you! I skimmed through the article and didn't find this. Should have used CTRL+F :)

I highly doubt it is going to happen. Should have started from scratch, in Rust.

It's not exactly a stupid thought. My immediate reaction was: 1) 25% more LOC, 2) in unsafe Rust, 3) for a tool that already has great maintainence.

The only reason this is at the top of HN is because of where Rust is on the Gartner Hype Cycle right now.

It's neat, but I wouldn't say useful.

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