Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by predictabl3 1109 days ago
This doesn't make any sense to me. Stable Rust is forward compatible just as much as shell scripts are. Bash, for example, does introduce things in newer versions and they're near universally ignored.

All of this also excludes that the fact that your shell script will be just as janky in 10 years as it is now. Again, I regularly, regularly see shell scripts from companies that HN fawns over that don't pass shellcheck and have inherent issues that don't occur in better scripting languages, or full programming languages.

"Forward-compat" is not unique, and not a value proposition to me if it inherently means less reliable function.
1 comments
superkuh 1109 days ago
Here's an anecdote to provide sense. I recall when I was using a 3 month old (1.48.0 2020-11-19) rustc on Debian 11 (right before it was officially released) and I kept running into rust software I couldn't compile because rust devs used bleeding edge 1.50 (2021-02-11) features. This wasn't a debian is old thing. The rustc was literally 3 months old at this point. At least one of the devs was a person I knew on IRC. He was kind enough to re-write it ("plotsweep" a rust software defined radio program) using only 1.48 and older features. But that's the exception. Most rust devs assume your toolchain is from 3rd party out-of-repository and latest and think forwards compatibility is useless like you do.

Shell scripts can be and often are jank. But at least it's stable jank. Shell devs tend to write portable, stable code because that's the entire point of dealing with the shell jank.

link
predictabl3 1109 days ago
Yeah, I think we're not going to agree on this. I very much like living in a world where I get to use stable, released software, provided by my distro, to build reliable software that is forward compatible.

> This wasn't a debian is old thing.

From my reading and understanding, yeah, it was.

link
bheadmaster 1109 days ago
Three months old software is new enough to be in Arch repository, so in this case it's not about Debian being old, it's about rust devs using bleeding edge features.

If you're contradicting a person's argument ("yeah, it was") at least provide some more explanation, otherwise your comment is rarely more than a "is too!".

link