[90s_dev]

What if -- stay with me now -- what if we solved it by just writing vastly less code, and having actually reusable code, instead of reinventing every type of wheel in every project? Maybe that's the real secret to sound code. Actual code reuse. I know it's a pipedream, but a man can dream, can't he?

[codr7]

The way we've done code reuse up to this point rarely lives up to its promises.

I don't know what the solution is, but these days I'm a lot more likely to simply copy code over to a new project rather than try to build general purpose libraries.

I feel like that's part of the mess Rust/Swift are getting themselves tangled up in, everything depends on everything which turns evolution into more and more of an uphill struggle.

[josephg]

Why? In C I'd understand. But cargo and the swift package manager work great.

By all means, rewrite little libraries instead of pulling in big ones. But if you're literally copy+pasting code between projects, it doesn't take much work to pull that code out into a shared library.

[saagarjha]

No, this doesn't solve the problem. Libraries have security issues like every other codebase.

[0x6c6f6c]

Yeah that is the opposite take of recent posts that the Cargo/npm package dependence is way too heavy.

Saying we should rely on reusable modules is great and all, but that reusable code is going to be maintained by who now?

There's no sustainable pattern for this yet, most things are good graces of businesses or free time development, many become unmaintained over time- people who actually want to survive on developing and supporting reusable modules alone might actually be more rare than the unicorn devs.

[90s_dev]

I meant in programming in general, not specific to Rust or Cargo.