dan@upvote.au 4 days ago
Looks like a good project, but I genuinely don’t quite understand why Rust projects feel the need to advertise “written in Rust” as a feature. Do you find that a lot of users care which programming language your app is written in? I don’t know which programming language most of my self-hosted apps use, and I don’t mind since they all work well and do their job.
I mean, for myself personally if it were written in NodeJS or Python or something I’d be less interested.
And I don’t even care about Rust. It’s just that everything and their sister is written in NodeJS and Python. I say this as someone who founded a company that uses Python.
Also the more I hear about actual Rust adoption the more willing I am to consider it for the next big thing.
if it were written in NodeJS or Python or something I’d be less interested.
Does it matter if it’s running in Docker and the container is lightweight (say less than 50MB), though? I like apps being written in a language I know well so I can contribute if needed, but other than that, I mostly treat a Docker image as a black box.
That’d be awesome. Unfortunately most of my experience (and I realize that is my experience) has so many packages dependencies that 50MB is impossible.
Don’t get me wrong, I am proficient in JS/TS so being able to work handily in NodeJS is great, less context switching, but I feel like so many companies in contract for just jam a square peg into a round hole because - and it just makes things painful.
Yeah it’s definitely not possible to reach 50MB with a Node.js Docker image, but <150MB should be doable with a distroless base image + compiling the app into one JS file (for example, using Parcel or esbuild).
It’s possible to reach ~50-60MB Docker image with a C# app though. Rust and Go definitely produce more compact binaries though.
It’s just a way to advertise, I think. I’ve found myself putting more trust in projects written in Rust or Go, than say, JavaScript.
It’s advertising the inherent safety that comes from Rust and Go having errors as values. They’re just fundamentally better languages.
As an information security professional and someone who works on tiny, embedded systems, knowing that a project is written in Rust is a huge enticement. I wish more projects written in Rust advertised this fact!
Benefits of Rust projects—from my perspective:
Thanks, this is a good insight.
People who are into systems languages would care and for newer languages the more people advertise their usage the more mainstream it becomes and then bigger more traditional companies would consider using it and that would help increase the size of that languages ecosystem and community so I’m okay with people adding written in Rust to their project descriptions
Lightfire228@pawb.social 4 days ago
Imo, it’s nice to see tools written in a memory safe systems language
Especially if you use a lot of them. More utility, less attack surface
dan@upvote.au 4 days ago
This makes sense! You get the same advantage if the app uses Go or C# though, and both of those can compile to a single statically-linked executable too.
riskable@programming.dev 1 day ago
If it’s written in C# that’s a huge turn-off though because that means it’s likely to only run on Windows.
I mean, in theory, it could run on Linux but that’s a very rare situation. Almost everything ever written in C# uses Windows-specific APIs and basically no one installs the C# runtime on Linux anymore. It’s both enormous and a pain in the ass to get working properly for any given C# project.
dan@upvote.au 1 day ago
C# has been cross platform for a long time.
Not really. Most C# apps use .NET libraries rather than direct Win32 calls, and .NET is cross-platform.
You can compile a C# app to a single executable that doesn’t require the framework to be installed.
Are you running Jellyfin, the *arr suite, slskd, or Technitium DNS? They’re all written in C#.