Oxidizing Fedora: Try Rust and Its Applications Today

https://fedoramagazine.org/oxidizing-fedora-try-rust-applications-today/

by rayascott • 8 years ago

103 31 8 years ago

fedoramagazine.org

majewsky• 8 years ago

exa is a prime example of how too much color absolutely ruins an otherwise good UI.

sotojuan• 8 years ago

Meh, persona choice. I really like the default color schemes.

jamespo• 8 years ago

don't mind all but the rainbow file permissions

jlgaddis• 8 years ago

I don't mind the color scheme but I think they overdid it. Not every bit of the permissions needs a different color. That makes it harder to read, for me.

jandrese• 8 years ago

I wonder how it looks on a white background? I definitely agree that they went overboard with colorizing the output.

My other question is are they working on a non ASCII layout that makes exa less awkward to type? The fact that "ls" uses two home row keys and the second is on the left hand (so the right is free to reach for enter) is not a coincidence.

I usually go a step further and alias 'ls' to 'd', reducing one keystroke on one of the most common operations.

phkahler2• 8 years ago

How about replacing the core utilities?

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

Etzos• 8 years ago

That seems like something that wouldn't be super valuable to put in place until all of the commands are completed, or at least close to completed.

empath75• 8 years ago

already been done: https://github.com/redox-os/coreutils

cbcoutinho• 8 years ago

The `uutils/coreutils` repo is a rust re-write of the GNU coreutils. The repo you posted is a rust re-write of the BSD coreutils

yjftsjthsd-h• 8 years ago

They've made strides, but there are still things missing (there's a list halfway down the page). Perhaps one could just use the tools that are complete and fall back to GNU for everything else, though last time I tried to do that cleanly it didn't play well with the packages. (I may just be missing options to do a partial build)

sp332• 8 years ago

Maybe instead of making it the system-wide default, you could use it for specific sensitive applications. That would make it more feasible to work around the missing features.

voxadam• 8 years ago

I'd love to know how this project compare to the similar Go based project go-coreutils.[0]

[0] https://github.com/ericlagergren/go-coreutils

abrowne2• 8 years ago

Looks like Fedora's missing fd https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

CUViper• 8 years ago

It will be available in Fedora 28+: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=25...

abrowne2• 8 years ago

Great! I had only searched https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages

simmons2• 8 years ago

I just installed Fedora 27 in a VM out of curiosity. As far as I can tell from a quick glance, it looks like these Rust executables (ternimal, tokei) statically link their dependent Rust crates (including the Rust standard library), which is the typical approach to building Rust programs. I do wonder if someday we'll see distributions arranging a common dependency realm (as much as possible) among their Rust programs so that shared libraries can be used to reduce the total memory and storage footprint.

solarkraft• 8 years ago

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be something developers are very interested in nowadays. While it would improve the overall system it would also hurt the solid compatibility and introduce further headaches for the user, possibly being attributed to the software.

Would be nice if it did happen, though.

arghwhat• 8 years ago

I would very much prefer if it did not happen. It does not really bring any benefits, but only brings horrors. Go and Rust both live in a statically linked state of bliss that should not be tainted.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

simmons2• 8 years ago

I agree. There are certainly many cases where static linking makes a lot of sense. The redundancy of statically linking a few self-contained applications can be negligible and the reduced administrative burden can be a great value. But a hypothetical future Rust-heavy distribution, with hundreds of programs, may be an exception.

I sometimes wonder what a lightweight "Rusty" distribution for consumer electronics applications might look like. You can go a long way with the Busybox monolithic binary approach, but that might be a pain for development and software updates at some point.

steveklabnik2• 8 years ago

Interesting, giving the package search a look, I thought they were dynamically linked.

Debian has a “debcargo” tool to turn crates.io packages into Debian ones so that they can do this.

newnewpdro3• 8 years ago

It's kind of funny how GNU/Linux used to intentionally have everything statically-linked that was involved in bringing up the system and needed for a rescue recovery session, so you could still administer a system even if your dynamic shared libraries were hosed.

Now I see people tout statically-linked binaries as if it's some kind of new thing brought by Golang and Rust. Though this may be a result of modern glibc being somewhat hostile towards and incompatible with static linking, so maybe the blame should fall on GNU for that one.

Netscape used to distribute statically-linked binaries for a number of *nix platforms as a way to avoid this problem all the way back in the 90s. All it needed was an X display server and stable kernel interfaces.

Eventually GNU/Linux changed to the point that everything was dynamically linked to the point that only `sln`, a statically linked `ln` was all you had to work with in lieu of a working dynamic linker to fix the system.

jburgess7772• 8 years ago

sln is on the way out too...

https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg241326.html

the_why_of_y• 8 years ago

Statically linked binaries on the root filesystem for recovery were obsoleted by initrd/initramfs many years ago.

sinh• 8 years ago

IIRC this is thought as a deliberate temporary solution because Rust does not yet has a stable ABI. There is no fundamental obstacle to build dynamically linked (shared) libraries in Rust.

VohuMana• 8 years ago

Been using ripgrep for a while now, I love it. One other Rust tool people might find useful is fd (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) which is similar to find.

steveklabnik2• 8 years ago

fd was left out of this article because it’s in the version of Fedora after the one the article is based on, incidentally.

Oxidizing Fedora: Try Rust and Its Applications Today

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