Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby
smallcultfollowing.com28 points by MeetingsBrowser 2 days ago
28 points by MeetingsBrowser 2 days ago
For those struggling for context like me: this is about the Rust programming language.
The hobbyist device maker in me took waaay to long to be certain that this is NOT about physical batteries...
(was already confident, then there's suddenly a screenshot mentioning display components)
> Battery packs are meant to address one of the most common things I hear from new Rust adopters. Everyone loves the wealth of high-quality crates available on crates.io. And everyone hates having to spend a bunch of time researching and comparing alternatives.
> [...]
> One of the key ideas from battery packs is that anybody can publish one.
So now we get to research and compare alternative battery packs? I guess it could help if there's fewer of them, but I don't see why that would be.
at the very least you could follow some trusted entity's recommendation for a bunch of crates at once. e.g. if the author of some large rust project like bevy published a battery pack I would pay attention because they have had to solve the problem of picking out several crates and seeing that they all work well together.
In my opinion this will just worsen the ecosystem. Many Rust crates are already bloated with dependencies.
Go ecosystems seems to choose quality over quantity (fewer higher-quality libraries) over Rust.
What seems to be causing this?
Money dictates personal philosophies.
Rust and Node have too many deps because you can't make a Patreon or Github Sponsors page for contributions to stdlib.
Go is batteries-included because it was made by Google by people with a salary.
The people writing "thousands of small packages are good" are the people making money from the clout of having made thousands of small packages.
I'd say ease of package management. You can see this with Python too.
Package management is easier in Go than almost any other ecosystem, including Rust, Python and Javascript. And Go projects may have tens of package dependencies. Yet it's closer to a C++ project which has single-digit dependencies than a Javascript project which has tens of thousands.
Off we go comparing battery packs.
Seriously though, I wish the dual futures, streams types to be consolidated first than building anything on top of the situation.
Futures would be less of a problem if async was implemented as effect handling instead of coloring functions - I am truly miffed about e.g. not being to use `or_insert_with` with a fallible async function. That and build sandboxing are my 2 pie in the sky dreams for a rust edition far, far away.
> if async was implemented as effect handling
By any chance, was there a proposal for that I could read?