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0 pointsnicoburns3y ago0 comments

Rust/Cargo manage to deal with interfacing with lots of legacy C and C++ code (not sure about Fortran) while still "just working" seamlessly. Usually it's easier to get a C library to build via the Rust package (just `cargo add package && cargo build`) than it is to integrate it into a C build system.

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bayesian_horse3y ago· 2 in thread

Not my point. Pip/setuptools can build most C/C++ code just fine. Most, maybe even "almost all an average user would care about". But Rust doesn't extend into the same depth, and once it does you can expect the same issues. And you hardly ever need to compile Python extensions with pip or conda either, because both can distribute binaries for the most used platforms anyways.

Yoric3y ago

FWIW, last time I attempted to install a Python dev environment under Windows (for teaching purposes), I eventually gave up because I couldn't get all my dependencies working. That is an important data point for me. Fortunately, I had a macbook at hand for teaching, but that's hardly ideal.

I'm not sure what you mean about Rust not extending into the same depth, could you elaborate?

bayesian_horse3y ago

That must have been some strange dependencies. When I install anaconda on Windows, there's almost nothing to do to get Tensorflow, Torch, Jupyter etc going. Same with Blender, it just plain works.

And if not then that's not a packaging issue but rather a problem about portability because yes, some packages are system specific, and Windows is quite specific. One way around even those issues is to use either WSL2 or Docker desktop, maybe using VSC development containers or WSL remote.

There's always a fringe of packages in every package manager that deosn't have the greates compatibility among different dependencies and systems. Python's ecosystem is no exception to that.

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bsder3y ago

Not even close.

What is going on in the Python ecosystem is people expect Python to interface to C/C++ modules on Windows. Reliably. And no other ecosystem even really tries.

As an example, Rust interfacing to Skia (C++) used to cause hideous build errors on various Windows installs. I needed to install and upgrade significant chunks of Visual Studio (not VSCode--actual Visual Studio) before the Rust system could compile it correctly. And the next Windows update it all broke again.

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