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by ori_b 2078 days ago
Saying "The people complaining are right, but they've been right a long time" isn't a great endorsement of the situation.
2 comments

I mean, you're just repeating a sibling comment, but if development has been this way for a long time, it's on the folks who are suggesting the new way to get out there and prove that it's a viable model for software development. It appears that most real-world, actually used software works like this.

I am all about improving the world, don't get me wrong, but saying "hey this software works just like all the other software" isn't really the insult that you seem to think that it is.

> saying "hey this software works just like all the other software" isn't really the insult that you seem to think that it is.

Well, it's common knowledge that most existing software is compete and utter crap, as evidenced by the fact that our first thought upon hearing that a particular piece of software is no longer being updated is not "oh good, it is (probably) finished and we can rely on it", but rather "on no, now the innumerable defects no doubt still latent in it will remain unfixed". So "this software is just as bad as all the other software" is, while not a very grave insult in a relative sense, still quite damning in absolute terms.

It depends. If it's in a github repo and there isn't a massive backlog of issues for a software that hasn't been updated in a while, I might think that.

One good thing about stat counters for packages combined with GitHub for issue tracking of you can kind of tell.

It does take some level of die diligence and isn't easy. But neither is anything relying on say system installed libraries in C projects.

I'd rather have the package managers than not.

Can you give even a single example of:

- a significant (eg, at least as complex as wget) software project,

- that has been unmaintained (no updates, code has the same MD5/etc hash),

- with a significant userbase (not sure exactly how to define that one),

- for a significant amount of time (at least five years),

- which is generally regarded as finished and bug-free (not in need of further development) rather than abandoned?

Because I can't think of a single one, and the only ones that even come close are video games where the known bugs were co-opted into gameplay features. The general consensus seems to be that any system that doesn't have automatic updates running is de-facto insecure (which, since every update mechanism I've heard of can introduce new code (ie new security vulnerabilities), means any system whatsoever is insecure).

(I don't quite disagree with the tacit assertion that actually getting things right on - if not the first try - then at least one of the first thirty or so is a extremely, maybe even unreasonably high standard, but it manifestly is a standard that basically all existing nontrivial software projects fail to meet.)

5 years is a relatively rough one... in terms of libraries, I come across a lot that are 2+ years old that are feature complete and work. In terms of applications, there are a couple other responses in this thread, but the specific focus in reference was really on libraries themselves, which shouldn't be as complex as wget in general.
It seems to me Rust folks have developed this habit of deflecting blame by pointing to shallow commentary. One of good examples is compiler slowness reasons, sometimes its LLVM, or it is lot of optimizations, or it is not really slow compare to C++ and so on.

They could have said it straight "Guys highly optimized, safe compilation of medium size project will be in range of 20-30 min". And that would great and honest way to deal. Instead we get oh, we have reduced compile times from 26 minutes to 21 minutes so it is 19% improvement in just one year and there is more to come. Now this is hard work and great but I am sure Rust committers understand when people say fast compile times they most likely comparing to Go etc which would be under a minute for most mid size projects. And this is very well not going to happen.

Same is now to Cargo dependency situation. Cargo and NPM are ideologically in agreement that people in general should just pull it from package manager instead of rewriting even little bit of code. And again instead of owning it there will be list of shallow reasoning: others do it too, reusing is better that rewriting, cargo is so awesome that pulling crate is much easier and so on.

Your argument seems to be "people see problems and other people explain why those problems exist" and somehow you frame it like it's a bad thing.
No my point is Rust fans try to win very narrow technical arguments even when they should clearly know discussion is about big picture. And yes it seems bad thing to me.
On an internet forum when someone brings up a topic lots of people will respond with different opinions about that topic. You can act like this is somehow specific to the Rust community, but I don't think it is.

TBH you seem to have a really odd bias against Rust, you repeatedly take something about it that's positive and try to spin it as negative, like possibly even for years? Maybe examine that.

Rust core leadership treats most technical problems as marketing problems.