> arrayref is a small crate of four macros.
Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
Why do so many languages fall into this horrible practice?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82ly38YEEQ
Summary: it's cultural. Rust likely inherited the practice from Nodejs, who inherited it from Ruby. I think in Rust online spaces in particular there is also this undercurrent of "you're not smart enough to use certain parts of the language, so download libraries that handle that stuff for you."
Build a simple makefile, and you're off to the races.
At least, for my cases, that is.
With NPM and Rust's focus on project's level dependencies, there's no longer emphasis on API stability. Instead we have breakage every months, forcing everyone on the upgrade treadmill. It's easier to audit C library because they focus mostly on security updates instead of redesigning the API for the nth time.
It never ends .·°՞(っ-ᯅ-ς)՞°·.
Nothing is preventing anyone from distributing Rust crates as standard system packages, like some distros do with Python.
I think Debian is actually shipping rust libs in their repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/Rust Now Rust developers can also enjoy having to deal with popular packages that are years out of date/missing from popular repositories/getting deleted.
I understand not every language can have Go's amazing stdlib, but I would much prefer Pyhton's approach where every now and then some package/function from the stdlib gets deprecated/removed. Rust's 3rd party ecosystem is the worst thing from the language, worse than the compile times.
This is why Javascript and Typescript suffer from this the most and has little to nothing to do with "popularity" and likely 9/10 of these npm packages import an external library.
Golang on the other-hand is just as popular and has a stronger standard library which people build against and it is encouraged to use its standard library rather than rolling your own or importing another package to solve the problem.
The reason I don't think it's a sufficient explanation is that there is a clear history of large, 3rd party libraries being created exactly to supplement poor standard libraries. C++ has Boost, Java has Apache Commons (though Java also has a pretty huge standard library), arguably we could even say C has Posix/Win32/Cocoa.
I believe there is some deeper cultural reason why certain language ecosystems coalesce large utility libraries, while others prefer myriad tiny dependencies.
I remember the days where I had to manually put the Spring .jar files into my project. No way I am doing that for 100s of dependencies.
Lots of languages have a bad stdlib but don’t fall into the trap of having thousands of micro libraries.
The reason people do it is because it brings clout and money. Just look for articles defending micro libs: the popular ones are by people who make a living on donations, due to maintaining 1000+ packages.
And collaborating in larger libs/stdlib is hard. Plus: Rust, Node, all have a lot of visibility.
You need a good stdlib culture to avoid it (like Go did).
Java's standard library had arguably also been poor for a very long time and "import tons of libraries" just had not been practical for most of that time because the tooling and ecosystem for that did not exist yet.
The solution was apache-commons and guava. Two large libraries with everything the developers heart desired and well maintained by large organizations.
For Rust be probably will never have anything exactly like that because requirements from no-std development to fully fledged backend service are too diverse, but there is still room for a small number of well maintained backed by reputable developers convenience libraries in my opinion.
And it has to be mandatory. Top-level package names will always have more cachet. Developers are suckers for good package names, literal or imaginative. Plus it helps address, but by no means completely solves, name and typo squatting.
I understand people and groups can run their own crates.io-like repository, but that's a tangential aspect. Even if this were ubiquitous, you'd still want mandatory namespacing. You want provenance, or at least intended/nominal provenance, to be as transparent as possible, not implicit or buried. By no means a complete solution, but an important foundation for better technical and culture patterns.
To build reputations (good or bad), an ecosystem needs branding--a reliable way to connect products to an identifiable group with a history. Reputations are crucial if you're just downloading blobs of code in a fast-paced environment, because you're not directly analyzing the code, certainly not every update, and usually not even initially. It's why you don't download software from random websites to run.
Linux and BSD distributions that packaged code were trusted (to varying degrees) to vet code through their package maintainers. People apt install packages with m less trepidation and risk than if they pulled random code off Github. The distro reputations tell you something, at least something much more credible that what availability on crates.io and github.com tell you.
Technical security processes, which are also lacking, are no substitute for social processes. They're complimentary; you need both. But the most rudimentary and important prerequisite for building more secure social processes is completely absent in the Rust crates ecosystem.
candle, the most popular rust ml library I found in a cursory search, has 119 for cpu only, and 150 to bring in CUDA.
I guess it's taste whether that's comparable
this would have been a way more satisfying dunk if nvidia hadn't split the cuda functionality needed by pytorch into 19 (!) packages on pypi but such is life.
But a Python example doesn't really count, in my mind -- Python is pre-GitHub so tends to have small numbers of large external dependencies, like C++ and other older languages.
But yeah, small number of large dependencies is the way to go.
> a lot of the Go standard library is also extremely low quality
Now adjust your definition of "a lot" to include all other languages instead of apparently arbitrarily deciding that "a lot" means at best 10 and pretending that "weird edge cases all over the place" isn't normal.
I also wonder what your issue is with most of those, especially since e.g. regexp is excellent in the context of this thread - it runs in linear time, so it's not possible to craft a malicious input that will make it slow down to a crawl.
> Over time many will probably get new incompatible versions just like json.
What a bizarre statement to make.
FYI: "The encoding/json package is now backed by the v2 implementation.". You get all the benefits possible from the v2 implementation for free while maintating backwards compat and if you want to upgrade to something better, v2 is right there.
Do you have some magical suggestion how this could have possibly been handled better? And no, not having json in the stdlib isn't a viable path, that's just a cop out. But I guess since e.g. Rust and Java don't have json in their stdlibs at all, you can't say their json packages are bad, how clever and smart!
Another frequently made suggestion straight from la-la land is just writing perfect code from the get-go. Brilliant, can't believe nobody's ever thought of that.
Meanwhile in the real world, you've been able to reap the benefits of the solid encoding/json for over a decade now, and with v2 you get some nice free backwards compatible improvements and have a clear path to upgrading to v2. Perfectly handled IMO.
The code in those packages is so far from perfect it's absurd. Like most Go developers, you just have extremely low standards.
It would be better to have blessed crates in crates.io. The Rust core team would release or audit them. If the blessed crates need breaking changes, it can be done by increasing their major semantic version number. That can't be done to the standard library.
Actually, there could be a "trust" level for crates: 1. blessed crates by the Rust core team, 2. trusted developers, 3. untrusted developers. Or something like that..
You could get rid of a huge portion of the go standard library and have a massive ecosystem of leftpads, but the fact that `go build` can easily be run in off-line mode and doesn't execute any code other than the go toolchain itself, means you have a fundamentally more trustworthy ecosystem overall.
Rust, on the other hand, might keep you from a subset of buffer overruns, but it will gladly run obfuscated, untrusted code in your name when you wouldn't otherwise expect it to.
As an industry, we need to somehow stop making this mistake.
You can trivially run Cargo in offline mode, via the --offline flag. Nothing about this capability, in either Go or Rust, results in a more particularly trustworthy ecosystem.
Rust has done nothing to make me safer (although I agree that memory safety is desirable) and the supply chain issues make me less safe.
Still parts of the industry want it. If your business is putting locked down app stores and media-consuming devices in everybody pockets, than memory safety is much more important than for the rest of us.
Make dependencies annoying to use and it forces people to be more disciplined about them and if you do insist on a package manager you should not support transitive dependencies at all, packages should be self contained.
The problem is that these languages have repositories are both free for all and have no consumer side vetting out of the box.
Linux distributions have maintainers that vet the packages and that's why you can blindly download transitive dependencies with your OS package manager.
But you can't do the same with the AUR. The AUR workflow requires you to actually read the PKGBUILD.
Writing macros in rust is a pretty horrible experience but it's not difficult
The better practice is for bigger projects to form collecting such small utilities into larger utility libraries that have some organization, security practices, code reviews, etc. Good examples are Java's Apache Commons or C++'s Boost.