[dralley]

>if true, it suggests there's very little public Rust outside of packages that can be downloaded from crates.io and a smallish list of alternatives.

You seem to be suggesting that it's a good thing that the public code is spread across so many different places that it cannot all be found. I don't see how that's an inherently good thing. It says less about the total amount of code than it does about the lack of any central resource that can be consulted.

[eesmith]

> that it cannot all be found.

Do you think you can find all public Rust code?

Like, if I'm teaching a Rust course, and put a hello-world.rs program on my department's public GitLab instance, under an MIT license, do you think I should also put that on GitHub? And register it as a crate?

> the lack of any central resource that can be consulted.

And you say that like it's a good thing.

You want everything to be centralized on GitHub? If so, you want to force all research software developers to agree to the GitHub's terms, including those who are ardent free software advocates.

You also prevent 12 years olds from publishing their Rust source code. (GitHub's terms of service don't allow that.)

Or, do you also allow BitBucket [1], and GitLab [2]?

[1] https://bitbucket.org/project_samar/samar_lite/src/master/ contains two Rust programs, neither on crates.io

[2] https://gitlab.com/rouault-team-public/analysis/umaprs

What about department instances of GitLab? [3]

https://gitlab.anu.edu.au/mu/mu-impl-fast/-/tree/rtmu-dev

It really doesn't seem like it's all that easy to find all publicly available Rust code.

[dralley]

What bearing does any of this have on the previous thread of discussion?

Why do you think a 12 year old needs to publish their "hello world" programs because of Crater? The purpose of Crater is uncovering subtle compiler regressions. If "hello world" is ever broken then it would likely be discovered by the standard test suite or generally long before the Crater run.

This isn't a matter of "allowing" anything. It's just a statement that yes a Crater run does test all meaningful publicly available code, where "meaningful" at the very least means code which is consumed via crates.io. Sure, there is very likely public code that exists elsewhere which Crater cannot find, and that's OK. The point is that a Crater run coming back clean means something, because a very very wide swath of code was tested.

[eesmith]

What is "the previous thread of discussion?"

My response was all of 5 lines, saying that if dthul's comment were true, then it implies that Rust has a rather small code base.

And indeed, Crater does not test all publicly available Rust code. ("Not all code is on crates.io! There is a lot of code in repos on GitHub and elsewhere", and only for "Linux builds on x86_64", not Windows, says https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/tests/crater.html).

Rust is much bigger than dthul's comment implies.

You may well be correct when adding the qualifier "meaningful", but that's a different thread of discussion.

> Why do you think a 12 year old needs to publish their "hello world" programs because of Crater?

I mentioned that because you changed the thread of discussion to discuss centralized vs. decentralized code distribution.

> because a very very wide swath of code was tested.

And C++ language developers also analyze a 'wide swath of code' - millions of lines or more - for changes.

[59nadir]

To be fair to the original argument, I think it's important to understand that there is next to no Rust code in comparison to the amount of C++ code out there. It has almost no projects in comparison, and those projects are much, much smaller. I don't think that's a very controversial statement, because it's very obviously true.

Now, it's also important to keep in mind that C++ has a terrible story when it comes to centralized (or otherwise, really?) repositories for packages, so the corresponding system for C++ is at the moment completely infeasible and not at all useful. That doesn't really make the Rust code that's tested against any more meaningful in comparison to the vast amounts of C++ code out there, though.

Edit:

At the kind of pointless and debilitating scale that C++ exists and then with the relationship C++ has with packages and dependency management this entire idea is basically impossible.