Hacker News Reader

Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

Aside from Rust being better (impl is such a great decoupling, fearless type safety), there is afaik nothing one tenth as useful and good as cargo & is crate ecosystem (docs rs, crates.io, and all the packages).

I find it odd the broader hacker community feels the need to requestion and cross-examine every choice for using rust. Like, no other language has such great just works ergonomics, with a solid language, fantastic tooling, excellent packages that gives it a just works the first time cross-platform joy. Why does every thread have to spawn a brand new unsupported whinge throwing dirt at what seems like such an obvious enjoyable choice?

View on HN

I think you might be misunderstanding the parent comment. It sounds to me like they're arguing in favor of wrapping C GUI library when writing a GUI app in Rust, not avoiding Rust entirely. As far as I can tell, they're arguing for writing new stuff in Rust that happens to be re-using some components that aren't in Rust. I'd argue that's entirely in the spirit of Rust; kind of the whole point is that you can put a hard boundary on where the unsafety lies and make everything safe outside of that boundary. When I use a Vec or a HashMap, there's unsafe code under the hood, but it doesn't stop me from writing my own code without needing to dip into unsafe at all, and there's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't be done by wrapping Qt or Gtk on Linux or Cocoa or MacOS.

Qt is great, but it's a commercial license.

Not if you dynamically link it. LGPL.

Is it that simple?

Happy 10 years to the GPL & LPGLv2.1->LGPLv3 license update & Qt starting to expose more of Qt. https://lwn.net/Articles/671755/

On desktop it can be pretty simple. On mobile it can be a hot mess. Essentially with LGPL you have to provide a way for users to replace your version of the LGPL lib with one they choose.

Also the company seems to be trying to wiggle out from under the open source spirit of the license the last few years, which doesn't bode well.

Ah, I meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003058. Never questioned the use of Rust, only the need for the entire windowing stack to be in Rust (that blog post shows a case where it bit them)

One could argue that Rust isn't well suited for GUI development at all, where class-based OOP really shines.

Then there is the issue that the Rust community likes to rewrite classic C programs because of "memory safety" and "modern tooling," but really just focuses on the easy 80% of the work. It feels like these rewrites are more done to gain popularity on GitHub than anything, as they most often remain incomplete and never replace the original implementation.

Finally there is the GPL to MIT licensing issue, on which much has been said already.

Rust build times are not an enjoyable part of its DX

Reply on news.ycombinator.com