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0 pointsfrangonf3h ago0 comments

So the geniuses in the datacenter prefer to rewrite the full codebase in another language instead of maintaining and improving its own fork or contributing to make the current language better.

Impressive to rewrite 1MLOC in a week yes, but this is more of a job of a million monkey programmers crammed in a datacenter than a bunch geniuses. And I would know, since I'm a monkey programmer who is in danger now... Or maybe the Zig team is in a greater danger, since their brains hold the genius juice the clankers are missing and they should have it by 2027...

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q3k3h ago

No matter how I look at this, it's churn for the sake of churn.

Even if the translation was free and into ideal idiomatic Rust (and it's obviously not - it's now Zig with Rust syntax) then this would be churn for the sake of churn.

At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor, and you're instead mostly dealing with working past past architectural decisions, integration of large changes, deep optimization, steering the codebase into alignment with project roadmaps and long-term goals, regression testing as features get introduced, maintenance of multiple release trains... Experienced software engineers mostly stop caring about simple things like the programming language choice at that point, because whatever issues come from that choice have already been resolved. What matters is stability, careful orchestration of large changes and a stable and comprehensive test suite.

nefasti1h ago

The "idiomatic Rust" thing rubs me the wrong way. If someone writes Rust that compiles and works, that's Rust. full stop. Telling people it doesn't count until it's "idiomatic" is just gatekeeping. It quietly says you're not a real Rust dev until you've put in years and absorbed all the unwritten rules, which shuts out exactly the people who are still learning. Everyone writes "non-idiomatic" code when they start. That's not a failure, that's how learning works. Even if being written by LLMs, the devs still will need to improve their knowledge to keep the codebase.

eesmith1h ago

I beliebe q3k's comment should be read as "[even if it's acceptable to the most stringent of gatekeepers] then this would be churn for the sake of churn."'

Not that only idiomatic Rust is appropriate.

IshKebab1h ago

Not really. Rust is designed to be written in a certain way. If you machine translate C into Rust you end up with a load of `unsafe` code that follows the C style but consequently doesn't get any of the benefits of being written in Rust.

Imagine if you translated assembly to C++, but you just did it by putting everything in `asm("...")` calls. That's not idiomatic C++ and you wouldn't get any of the benefits of using C++.

That said, the Rust code I skimmed actually did look surprisingly idiomatic. It wasn't full of `unsafe` like I would have expected.

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