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arendjr

@ arendjr @programming.dev

Posts
13
Comments
113
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I think Deno made a huge mistake. (Node compatibility)

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  • You’re ignoring the fact that for many projects it does work.

    It only needs to be perfect if you want to run 100% Node.js software unaltered. While that may be a lofty goal, it’s also an infeasible one.

    That doesn’t mean imperfect support is futile though. By your logic, Bun has no right to exist because it only supports Node.js APIs and doesn’t have noteworthy APIs of its own, and they’re not perfect either. Yet they seem to be at least as successful as Deno is.

    Or for an example in a different domain: Your argument would state that a project like WINE shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t have perfect compatibility with Windows, and it disincentivizes development of Linux games. Yet it is largely thanks to WINE that Valve has been able to make the Steam Deck and that Linux gaming is finally taking off.

    I think what your argument fails to take into account is that you need a significant amount of users to make any impact on the market. And many users have legacy requirements that they can’t throw out overnight, so you have to support those legacy environments. And even with imperfect legacy support you can support your users, especially if the users are willing to make a few changes here or there. But if you have no legacy support, you also get no users except those that have niche greenfield requirements.

    So instead of trying to replace NodeJS or offering an upgrade path for existing Node projects, incentivize formation of ecosystem around Deno

    They are incentivizing their own ecosystem. That’s what Jsr.io is all about. But the world isn’t black and white. They can do more than one thing.

  • Zero Bugs

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  • I dunno, I still see a blog post. Which is hosted in their own issue tracker, which is of course odd, but also the point.

    Maybe it went down for a bit?

  • The harder job

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  • So I do consider myself to be a true full-stack developer, since I do have 5+ years of experience working on each of server-side, CLI, desktop applications, and mobile applications and 10+ years on the web frontend. Then again, I’m 40 and I feel too old to get offended over that shit. I also agree the term “full-stack” is diluted as hell, so I don’t even call myself that anymore.

    Now get off my lawn :p

  • This Thursday, I gave a presentation about @biomejs at the office in #Amsterdam. It was great to hear all the positive feedback about our project, and anecdotes from both users and people

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  • A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

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  • I would love to see Go, Rust, Swift and Kotlin added to this. Anyone willing to take a shot?

  • What's the most "set and forget" Linux distro that's still flexible these days?

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  • I use EndeavourOS and really enjoy it. It’s effectively Arch but without the fuss. You get a GUI with just a few steps to set it up and you’re good to go. I tend to upgrade once a week, while checking the forums to see nothing too bad broke. That’s basically the maintenance I have.

    When I do a new install on a new device, I just clone a repo I keep with the most important config files. Then I copy them to where they belong. There’s really not much more to it.

  • Embedded and sandboxed scripting languages in Rust

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  • Boa is a remarkably well-developed JS runtime written in Rust. Nice API, and well sandboxed. We’re considering adopting it for Biome as well.

  • Removed Locked

    Democracy offers a peaceful path from it to other systems

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  • Unfortunately true. I have no solution for the American people. Merely sharing my thoughts to hopefully limit the impact on the democracies that remain.

  • Feds: Critical Software Must Drop C/C++ by 2026 or Face Risk

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  • Using smart pointers doesn’t eliminate the memory safety issue, it merely addresses one aspect of it. Even with smart pointers, nothing is preventing you from passing references and using them after they’re freed.

  • A comparison of Rust's borrow checker to the one in C#

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  • Would you have a link to that? I know there are many third-party garbage collectors for Rust, but if there’s something semi-official being proposed or prototyped I’d be most curious :)

  • A comparison of Rust's borrow checker to the one in C#

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  • Cool, that was an informative read!

    If we were willing to leak memory, then we could write […] Box::leak(Box::new(0))

    In this example, you could have just made a constant with value 0 and returned a reference to that. It would also have a 'static lifetime and there would be no leaking.

    Why does nobody seem to be talking about this?

    My guess is that the overlap in use cases between Rust and C# isn’t very large. Many places where Rust is making inroads (kernel and low-level libraries) are places where C# would be automatically disqualified because of the requirements for a runtime and garbage collection.

  • Self-documenting Code

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  • I think that’s very team/project dependent. I’ve seen it done before indeed, but I’ve never been on a team where it was considered idiomatic.

  • How proficient do you rate yourself in your most coded language?

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  • I don’t know about your workplace, but if at all possible I would try to find time between tasks to spend on learning. If your company doesn’t have a policy where it is clear that employees have the freedom to learn during company time, try to underestimate your own velocity even more and use the time it leaves for learning.

    About 10 years ago I worked for a company where I was performing quite well. Since that meant I finished my tasks early, I could have taken on even more tasks. But I didn’t really tell our scrum master when I finished early. Instead I spent the time learning, and also refactoring code to help me become more productive. This added up, and my efficiency only increased more, until at some point I only needed one or two days to complete a week’s sprint. I didn’t waste my time, but I used it to pick up more architectural stuff on the side, while always learning on the job.

    I’ll admit that when I started this route, I already had a bunch of experience under my belt, and this may not be feasible if you have managers breathing down your neck all the time. But the point is, if you play it smart you can use company time to improve yourself and they may even appreciate you for it.

  • OOP is not that bad

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  • If we’re looking at it from a Rust angle anyway, I think there’s a second reason that OOP often becomes messy, but less so in Rust: Unlimited interior mutability. Rust’s borrow checker may be annoying at times, but it forces you to think about ownership and prevents you from stuffing statefulness where it shouldn’t be.

  • What are your favorite statically typed, compiled, memory safe programming languages?

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  • You can use the regular data structures in java and run into issues with concurrency but you can also use unsafe in rust so it’s a bit of a moot point.

    In Java it isn’t always clear when something crosses a thread boundary and when it doesn’t. In Rust, it is very explicit when you’re opting into using unsafe, so I think that’s a very clear distinction.

    Java provides classes for thread safe programming, but the language isn’t thread safe. Just like C++ provides containers for improved memory safety, and yet the language isn’t memory safe.

    The distinction lies between what’s available in the standard library, and what the language enforces.

  • What are your favorite statically typed, compiled, memory safe programming languages?

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  • Modern C++ does use references, which can also reference memory that is no longer available. Avoiding raw pointers isn’t enough to be memory safe.

  • Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

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  • Try browsing the list of somewhat recent #CVE rated critical, as I just did to verify. A majority of them is not related to any memory errors. Will you tell all them “just use a different programming language”?

    I'm sorry, but this has been repeatedly refuted:

    And yes, they are telling their engineers to use a different programming language. In fact, even the NSA is saying exactly that: https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/3215760/nsa-releases-guidance-on-how-to-protect-against-software-memory-safety-issues/

    It doesn’t come out today, it’s been there for a long time, and it’s standardized, proven and stable.

    This seems like an extremely short-sighted red herring. C has so many gaps in its specification, because it has no problem defining things as "undefined behavior" or "implementation defined", that the standard is essentially useless for kernel-level programming. The Linux kernel is written in C and used to only build with GCC. Now it builds with GCC and LLVM, and it relies on many non-standard compiler extensions for each. The effort to add support for LLVM took them 10 years. That's 10 years for a migration from C to C. Ask yourself: how is that possible if the language is so well standardized?

  • Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

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  • Great suggestions! One nitpick:

    But in principle I find this quite workable, as you get to write your CI code in Rust.

    Having used xtask in the past, I’d say this is a downside. CI code is tedious enough to debug as it is, and slowing down the cycle by adding Rust compilation into the mix was a horrible experience. To add, CI is a unique environment where Rust’s focus on correctness isn’t very valuable, since it’s an isolated, project-specific environment anyway.

    I’d rather use Deno or indeed just for that.

  • Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

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  • No, OP asked for a black and white winner. I was elaborating because I don’t think it’s that black and white, but if you want a singular answer I think it should be clear: Rust.

  • Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

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  • I would say at this point in time it’s clearly decided that Rust will be part of the future. Maybe there’s a meaningful place for Zig too, but that’s the only part that’s too early to tell.

    If you think Zig still has a chance at overtaking Rust though, that’s very much wishful thinking. Zig isn’t memory safe, so any areas where security is paramount are out of reach for it. The industry isn’t going back in that direction.

    I actually think Zig might still have a chance in game development, and maybe in specialized areas where Rust’s borrow checker cannot really help anyway, such as JIT compilers.