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0 pointsjosephg1y ago0 comments

> The obvious examples you want to use work fine, but the feature needs to be designed in such a way that the language remains internally consistent and works in all edge cases.

True. How long should that process take? A month? A year? Two years?

I ask because this feature has been talked about since I started using rust - which (I just checked) was at the start of 2017. Thats nearly 8 years ago now.

6 years ago this RFC was written: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2497-if-let-chains.html - which fixes my issues. But it still hasn't shipped.

Do I have too high expectations? Is 6 years too quick? Maybe, a decade is a reasonable amount of time to spend, to really talk through the options? Apparently 433 people contributed to Rust 1.81. Is that not enough people? Do we need more people, maybe? Would that help?

Yes, I do feel piqued by the glacial progress. I don't care about the || operator here - since I don't have any instinct for what that should do. And complex match expressions are already covered by match, anyway.

Rust doesn't do the obvious thing, in an obvious, common situation. If you ask me, this isn't the kind of problem that should take over 6 years to solve.

> Your commentary on Pin in this post is even more sophomoric than the rest of it and mostly either wrong or off the point. I find this quite frustrating, especially since I wrote detailed posts explaining Pin and its development just a few months ago.

If I'm totally off base, I'd appreciate more details and less personal insults.

I've certainly given Pin an honest go. I've used Pin. I've read the documentation, gotten confused and read everything again. I've struggled to write code using it, given up, then come back to it and ultimately overcame my struggles. I've boxed so many things. So many things.

The thing I've struggled with the most was writing a custom async stream wrapper around a value that changes over time. I used tokio's RwLock and broadcast channel to publish changes. My Future needed a self-referential type (because I need to hold a RwLockGuard across an async boundary). So I couldn't just write a simple, custom struct. But I also couldn't use an async function, because I needed to implement the stream trait.

As far as I can tell, the only way to make that code work was to glue async fn and Futures together in a weird frankenstruct. (Is this a common pattern? For all the essays about Pin and Future out there, I haven't heard anyone talk about this.) I got the idea from how tokio implements their own stream adaptor for broadcast streams[1]. And with that, I got this hairy piece of code working.

But who knows? I've written hundreds of lines of code on top of Pin. Not thousands. Maybe I still don't truly get it. I've read plenty of blog posts, with all sorts of ideas about Pin being about a place, or about a value, or a life philosophy. But - yes, I haven't yet, also read the 9000 words of essay you linked. Maybe if I do so I'll finally, finally be enlightened.

But I doubt it. I think Pin is hard. If it was simple, you wouldn't have written 9000 words talking about it. As you say:

> Unfortunately, [pin] has also been one of the least accessible and most misunderstood elements of async Rust.

Pin foists all its complexity onto the programmer. And for that reason, I think its a bad design. Maybe it was the best option at the time. But if we're still talking about it years later - if its still confusing people so long after its introduction - then its a bad part of the language.

I also suspect there are way simpler designs which could solve the problems that pin solves. Maybe I'm an idiot, and I'm not the guy who'll figure those designs out. But in that case, I'd really like to inspire smarter people than me to think about it. There's gotta be a simpler approach. It would be incredibly sad if people are still struggling with Pin long after I'm dead.

[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/blob/master/tokio-stream/s...

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withoutboats31y ago

I don't deny that Pin is complicated to use as it stands (in fact that is the entire thrust of my blog posts!), just that there is some magical easier solution involving Move and changes to the borrow checker. You wrote something on the back of a napkin and you imagine its better, whereas I actually had to ship a feature that works.

The state of async Rust is not better because no one hired me to finish it past the MVP. I have solutions to all of your problems (implementing a stream with async/await, making Pin easier to use, etc). Since I am not working on it the project has spun its wheels on goofy ideas and gotten almost no work done in this space for years. I agree this is a bad situation. I've devoted a lot of my free time in the past year to explaining what I think the project should do, and its slowly starting to move in that direction.

My understanding is that if let chaining is stalled because some within the project want to pretend there's a solution where a pattern matching operator could actually be a boolean expression. I agree that stalling things forever on the idea that there will magically be a perfect solution that has every desirable property in the future is a bad pattern of behavior that the Rust project exhibits. Tony Hoare had this insightful thing to say:

> One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

> The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late.

josephgOP1y ago

Thankyou for all your hard work on this. I'm sorry my post is, in many ways, dismissive of the huge amount of work that you and others have poured into rust, async, Pin, explaining Pin in detail over and over again, and all of the other things I take for granted in the compiler constantly.

But appreciation does little to temper my frustration. Watching the rust project spin its wheels has dulled any enthusiasm I might have once had for its open, consensus based processes. I could get involved - but I worry I'd be yet another commenter making long issue threads even longer. I don't think Rust has a "not enough cooks in the kitchen" shaped problem.

I love that quote. I agree with it - at some point, like with Pin and the 'foo.await' vs 'await foo' discussion - you just have to pick an answer, any answer, and move forward. But the siren song of that "simple and elegent" solution still calls. Alan Kay once made a similar observation. He pointed out that it took humanity thousands of years (and two geniuses) to invent calculus. And now we teach it to 8th grade children. How remarkable. Clearly, the right point of view is worth 50 IQ points.

I look forward to reading your blog posts on the topic. I suspect there's lots of workable solutions out there in the infinite solution space. Research is always harder and slower than I think it should be. And this is very much a research question.

You seem very convinced that replacing Pin with Move would be a mistake. Maybe! I wouldn't be surprised if the Move vs Pin question is a red herring. I suspect there's an entirely different approach which would work much better - something like, as I said in my post, attacking the problem by changing the borrow checker. Something like that. Maybe that wouldn't be viable for rust. Thats fine. There will be more languages following in its footsteps. I want them to be as good as possible.

And I swear, there's a better answer here somewhere.

I can feel it.

nazka1y ago

Modzilla not hiring you is just crazy. Love the work you do! In my view among the bests there is Dan for React and your one of them for Rust. :)

God bless you

withoutboats31y ago

I did work at Mozilla; I stopped contributing to Rust after Mozilla stopped funding the project.

pdimitar1y ago

> I've devoted a lot of my free time in the past year to explaining what I think the project should do, and its slowly starting to move in that direction.

That's very intriguing. Do you have any examples? Willing to learn more.

withoutboats31y ago

My blog is located at https://without.boats

Here are some relevant posts:

https://without.boats/blog/a-four-year-plan/

https://without.boats/blog/poll-next/

https://without.boats/blog/asynchronous-clean-up/

https://without.boats/blog/pinned-places/

jcranmer1y ago

> True. How long should that process take? A month? A year? Two years?

If you want a feature that everyone complains about, like Pin or async rust, yes, that is how long that process should take.

If you don't want a feature that everyone uses as their stock example for why language designers are drooling morons, and the feature has any amount of complexity to it, then the process should probably take over a decade.

There's a commonality to the features you're complaining about, and it's things where the desire to push a MVP that satisfied some, but not all, use cases overrode the time necessary to fully understand the consequences of decisions not just to implement the feature but its necessary interactions with other features, present and future.

I do appreciate the irony, though, of you starting about complaining about Rust moving too slowly before launching into detailed criticism of a feature that most agree is (at least in part) the result of Rust moving too quickly.

josephgOP1y ago

> before launching into detailed criticism of a feature that most agree is (at least in part) the result of Rust moving too quickly.

Is Pin the result of moving too quickly? Maybe.

Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s generally possible to explore the design space properly by having long conversations. At some point, you have to ship. Figure out if it’s a good idea with your feet. Just like pin did.

I don’t claim to be smarter than anyone on the rust team who worked on this feature before it was launched. Only, now it’s launched and people have used it, I think we should go back to the drawing board and keep looking for other approaches.

est311y ago

> 6 years ago this RFC was written: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2497-if-let-chains.html - which fixes my issues. But it still hasn't shipped.

As someone who has worked a lot to get if let chains stabilized (but so far not achieved the goal), there is surprisingly few blockers: only an ICE. But the ICE fix requires doing some breaking changes, so it's being phased in as part of the 2024 edition. The alternative to doing breaking changes would be to make if let chains different from if let, which wouldn't be nice.

Hopefully we'll have stable if let chains soon-ish. But note that nowadays on Rust, it's mostly volunteers working on the language, so things might not be as fast any more.

In any case, writing a language from scratch is going to be ten times more involved than targeting nightly Rust where if let chains are available.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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withoutboats31y ago

> One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

josephgOP1y ago

And I swear, there's a better answer here somewhere.

I can feel it.

nazka1y ago

Modzilla not hiring you is just crazy. Love the work you do! In my view among the bests there is Dan for React and your one of them for Rust. :)

God bless you

withoutboats31y ago

I did work at Mozilla; I stopped contributing to Rust after Mozilla stopped funding the project.

pdimitar1y ago

> I've devoted a lot of my free time in the past year to explaining what I think the project should do, and its slowly starting to move in that direction.

That's very intriguing. Do you have any examples? Willing to learn more.

withoutboats31y ago

My blog is located at https://without.boats

Here are some relevant posts:

https://without.boats/blog/a-four-year-plan/

https://without.boats/blog/poll-next/

https://without.boats/blog/asynchronous-clean-up/

https://without.boats/blog/pinned-places/

jcranmer1y ago

> True. How long should that process take? A month? A year? Two years?

If you want a feature that everyone complains about, like Pin or async rust, yes, that is how long that process should take.

josephgOP1y ago

> before launching into detailed criticism of a feature that most agree is (at least in part) the result of Rust moving too quickly.

Is Pin the result of moving too quickly? Maybe.

est311y ago

> 6 years ago this RFC was written: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2497-if-let-chains.html - which fixes my issues. But it still hasn't shipped.

Hopefully we'll have stable if let chains soon-ish. But note that nowadays on Rust, it's mostly volunteers working on the language, so things might not be as fast any more.

In any case, writing a language from scratch is going to be ten times more involved than targeting nightly Rust where if let chains are available.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse