Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Arnavion 2150 days ago
>Partially (or completely) migrate the project to a memory-safe language (e.g., convert one of the decoder/encoders in an image parsing library to Rust)

For this kind of contribution, I'm not sure there'll be too much spam. Eg most of the "Rewrite It In Rust"-kind of spam like [1] is people making suggestions, not actual PRs, because it does actually take effort. But...

>Add bindings making the library usable from Rust or Swift (e.g., adding official Swift bindings to an image parsing library)

... I'm not sure about this one. It could be as mindless as "just run bindgen on the C header, wrap it in a -sys crate" and send a PR. I don't actually understand why that kind of contribution is being awarded though, since having safe bindings doesn't make the actual library any safer. Furthermore, bindings don't need to be contributed to upstream, just like all the Rust bindings libraries today are mostly third-party.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAASwCXdQUiuUnhycdRvrU...
1 comments
reaperhulk 2150 days ago
Making more things accessible via memory safe languages allows people to more easily transition to those memory safe languages even if they have dependencies that are not themselves memory safe. Boiling the ocean is impractical and memory safety is not all or nothing, so we're interested in encouraging people to find ways to migrate larger and larger pieces.

That said, we will consider level of effort as a component of our judging process when determining eligibility and bounty size.

link
Arnavion 2150 days ago
>That said, we will consider level of effort as a component of our judging process when determining eligibility and bounty size.

I hope for your sake that you do, but just to be clear I don't think anyone in this thread is too concerned about whether you pay out the bounty or not. You can be as loose or as tight with your money as you'd like :)

The concern is from the point of view of the maintainers who will receive spam PRs / patches. Even if you don't pay out for that contribution, it will not unsend the PR / patch in the maintainer's mailbox.

link