The standard library does have some specialisation internally for certain iterators and collection combinations. Not sure if it will optimise that one specifically, but Vec::into_iter().collect::<Vec>() is optimised (it may look silly, but it comes up with functions returning impl Iterator

Hm, that is a fair point. Perhaps it would make sense to produce a table of checks: indicate which checks each dependency fails/passes, and then colour code them with severity.

Some experimentation on real world code is probably needed. I plan to try this tool on my own projects soon (after I manually verified that your crate match your git code (hah! Bootstrap problem), I already reviewed your code on github and it seemed to do what it claims).

Yes, obviously there are more ways to hide malicious code.

As for the git commit ID, I didn’t see you using it even when it was available though? But perhaps that could be a weakness, if the commit ID used does not match the tag in the repo, that would be a red flag too. That could be worth checking.

Due to the recent xz trouble I presume? Good idea, I was thinking about this on an ecosystem wise scale (e.g. all of crates.io or all of a Linux distro) which is a much harder problem to solve.

Not sure if the tag logic is needed though. I thought cargo embedded the commit ID in the published package?

Also I’m amazed that the name cargo-goggles was available.

Please, send an email to [email protected] to report this issue to them, they usually fix things quickly.

Sure, but my point was that such a C ABI is a pain. There are some crates that help:

• Rust-C++: cxx and autocxx
• Rust-Rust: stabby or abi_stable

But without those and just plain bindgen it is a pain to transfer any types that can’t easily just be repr(C), and there are quite a few such types. Enums with data for example. Or anything using the built in collections (HashMap, etc) or any other complex type you don’t have direct control over yourself.

So my point still stands. FFI with just bindgen/cbindgen is a pain, and lack of stable ABI means you need to use FFI between rust and rust (when loading dynamically).

In fact FFI is a pain in most languages (apart from C itself where it is business as usual… oh wait that is the same as pain, never mind) since you are limited to the lowest common denominator for types except in a few specific cases.

Yes, rust is that much of a pain in this case, since you can only safely pass plain C compatible types across the plugin boundary.

One reason is that rust doesn’t have stable layouts of structs and enums, the compiler is free to optimise the to avoid padding by reordering, decide which parts to use as niches for Options etc. And yes, that changes every now and then as the devs come up with new optimisations. I think it changes most recently last summer.

So there is a couple of options for plugins in Rust (and I haven’t tried any of them, yet):

• Wasm, supposedly https://extism.org/ makes this less painful.
• libloading + C ABI
• One of the two stable ABI crates (stabby or abi_stable) + libloading
• If you want to build them into your code base but not have to update a central list there is linkme and inventory.
• An embedded scripting language might also be a (very different) option. Something like mlua, rhai or rune.

I don’t know if any of these suit your needs, but at least you now have some things to investigate further.

Sounds interesting! As I don’t know restic that this is apparently based on, what are the differentiating factors between them? While I’m always on board for a rewrite in Rust in general, I’m curious as to if there is anything more to it than that.

EDIT: seems this is already answered in the FAQ, my bad.

I have read it, it is a very good book, and the memory ordering and atomics sections are also applicable to C and C++ since all of these languages use the same memory ordering model.

Can strongly recommend it if you want to do any low level concurrency (which I do in my C++ day job). I recommended it to my colleagues too whenever they had occasion to look at such code.

I do wish there was a bit more on more obscure and advanced patterns though. Things like RCU, seqlocks etc basically get an honorable mention in chapter 10.

Yes, Sweden really screwed up the first attempt at switching to Gregorian calendar. But there were also multiple countries who switched back and forth a couple of times. Or Switzerland where each administrative region switched separately.

But I think we in Sweden still “win” for worst screw up. Also, there is no good way to handle these dates without specific reference to precise location and which calender they refer to (timestamps will be ambiguous when switching back to Julian calendar).

My guess is that the relevant keyword for the choice of OpenSSL is FIPS. Rusttls doesn’t (or at least didn’t) have that certification, which matters if you are dealing with US government (directly or indirectly). I believe there is an alternative backend (instead of ring) these days that does have FIPS though.

Another aspect is that calling a cli command is way slower than a library function (in general). This is most apparent on short running commands, since the overhead is mostly fixed per command invocation rather than scaling with the amount of work or data.

As such I would at the very least keep those commands out of any hot/fast paths.

That assembly program the author compares to is waay bloated. This guy managed with 105 bytes: https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/tiny_elf_modernized.html (that is with overlapping part of the code into the ELF header and other similar level shenanigans). ;)

All kidding aside, interesting article.

The example FileDescriptorPollContext doesn’t really work. What if my runtime uses io-uring instead of polling? Those need very different interfaces to be sound. How do you abstract over that.

Swedish layout. Not ideal for coding (too many things like curly and square brackets etc are under altgr. And tilde and backtick are on dead keys.

But switching back and forth as soon as you need to write Swedish (for the letters åäö) is just too much work. And yes, in the Swedish alphabet they are separate letters, not aao with diacretics.

Two tips that work for me:

• After cargo add I have to sometimes run the “restart rust-analyzer” command from the vscode command pallette (exact wording may be off, I’m on my phone as of writing this comment). Much faster than cargo build.
• Consider using sccache to speed up rebuilds. It helps a lot, though uses a bit of disk space. But disk space is cheap nowadays (as long as you aren’t stuck with a laptop with soldered SSD, in which case you know what not to buy next time).

Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation!

Looks cool. Absolutely not my area of knowledge let alone expertise. But I thought digital colour stuff was all about ICC profiles (that basically describe how wrong a device handles colour and how to correct for it).

I don’t see any mention of ICC profiles in the docs though? Or is this the lower building block which you would use to work with data from ICC profiles? Basically I think I’m asking: who would use this crate and for what? Image viewers/editors?

I don’t feel like rust compile times are that bad, but I’m coming from C++ where the compile times are similar or even worse. (With gcc at work a full debug build takes 40 minutes, with clang it is down to about 17.)

Rust isn’t an interpreted or byte code compiled language, and as such it is hard to compete with that. But that is comparing apples and oranges really. Better to compare with other languages that compile to machine code. C and C++ comes to mind, though there are of course others that I have less experience with (Fortran, Ada, Haskell, Go, Zig, …). Rust is on par with or faster than C++ but much slower than C for sure. Both rust and C++ have way more features than C, so this is to be expected. And of course it also depends on what you do in your code (template heavy C++ is much slower to compile than C-like C++, similarly in Rust it depends on what you use).

That said: should we still strive to optimise the build times? Yes, of course. But please put the situation into the proper perspective and don’t compare to Python (there was a quote by a python developer in the article).