drogus · HackerTrans

drogus

661 karmajoined há 19 anos

Submissions

Memory safety absolutists

itsallaboutthebit.com

131 pointsby drogushá 3 dias230 comments

Show HN: Jaws – a JavaScript to WASM ahead-of-time compiler

github.com

290 pointsby drogushá 2 anos107 comments

Crows – a Rust and WebAssembly based load testing tool

itsallaboutthebit.com

6 pointsby drogushá 2 anos1 comments

Can Rust prevent logic errors?

itsallaboutthebit.com

24 pointsby drogushá 3 anos5 comments

Async Rust doesn't have to be hard

itsallaboutthebit.com

277 pointsby drogushá 4 anos188 comments

Arc and Mutex in Rust

itsallaboutthebit.com

4 pointsby drogushá 4 anos0 comments

comments

há 3 diasdiscuss

I don't have an obsession with you. I haven't read the entirety of your social media presence, but almost every time I see a discussion about Rust on Twitter, especially involving Fil-C, I see your criticism of Rust, without much nuance. To be honest, seeing your replies emphasizing Rust's memory unsafety under pretty much every tweet I've seen about the subject felt like an obsession with Rust, to me.

The problem I have with the framing I've seen countless times from you on social media is that I have never seen any nuance on what Rust's memory safety model achieves. You say you state facts, but stating facts without context can still be dishonest. Claims like "both C and Rust are memory unsafe languages" or "both C and Rust allow introducing memory safety vulnerabilities" are factually correct, but pretty much useless in practice.

I'm sorry for misinterpreting the "dislike" part. In retrospect I shouldn't have even brought like or dislike into it cause it was not the main point anyway. The main point was framing that I've seen on Twitter, not only from you, that in my opinion is quite one-sided.

I removed the dislike part from the post now.

há 7 mesesdiscuss

I think it's a mix of people being actually hyped and wishing this is the future. For me, productivity gains are mostly in areas where I don't have expertise (but the downside, of course, is I don't learn much if I let AI do the work) or when I know it's a throwaway thing and I absolutely don't care about the quality. For example, I'm bedtime reading a series of books for my daughter, and one of them doesn't have a Polish translation, and the Polish publisher stopped working with the author. I vibe coded an app that will extract an epub, translate each of the chapters, and package it back to an epub, with a few features like: saving the translations in sqlite, so the translation can be stopped and resumed, ability to edit translations, add custom instructions etc. It's only ~1000 lines of Rust code, but Claude generated it when I was doing dinner (I just checked progress and prompted next steps every few minutes). I can guarantee that it would take me at least an evening of coding, probably debugging problems along the way, to make it work. So while I know it's limited in a way it still lacks in certain scenarios (novel code in niche technology, very big projects etc), it is kinda game changer in other scenarios. It lets me do small tools that I just wouldn't have time to do otherwise.

So I guess what I'm saying is, even with all the limitations, I kinda understand the hype. That said, I think some people may indeed exaggerate LLMs capabilities, unless they actually know some secret recipe to make them do all those awesome hyped things (but then I would love to see that).

há 7 mesesdiscuss

> you have to understand almost all of the language very intimately to be a productive programmer,

I've seen absolute Rust noobs write production code in Rust, I have no idea where did you get that notion from. Most of the apps I've written or I've worked with don't even need to use explicit lifetimes at all. If you don't need absolute performance with almost none memory allocations, it's honestly not rocket science. Even more so if you're writing web backends. Then the code doesn't really differ that much from Go.

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Worker threads can't handle I/O, so a single process Node.js app will still have the connection limit much lower than languages where you can handle I/O on multiple threads. Obviously, the second thing you mention, ie. multiple processes, "solves" this problem, but at a cost of running more than one process. In case of web apps it probably doesn't matter too much (although it can hurt performance, especially if you cache stuff in memory), but there are things where it just isn't a good trade-off.

há 9 mesesdiscuss

What kind of reality check would it be when the original sudo got two even more serious security issues this year, even though it's "tried and tested"?

há 9 mesesdiscuss

There were two very serious issues in original sudo this year. I can't find much info about them on HN.

há 9 mesesdiscuss

I can't tell if you're being serious or not

há 11 mesesdiscuss

I love WASM and WASI, but it's not nearly the same, unfortunately. Performance takes a hit, you can't use async in a straightforward way, launching hundreds of thousands of tasks is problematic etc. WASM is great for allowing to extend your app, but I don't see it as a replacement for an ABI anytime soon

ano passadodiscuss

In my experience it really depends on the situation. For stable APIs that have been around for years, sure, it doesn't really matter that much. But if you try to use a library that had significant changes after the cutoff, the models tend to do things the old way, even if you provide a link to examples with new code.

ano passadodiscuss

While I agree with the sentiment here, ie. that Ruby doesn't necessarily need namespaces, I think it's also not necessarily good to base Ruby usage on what Shopify is doing. They have so many expert Ruby devs, and whole teams that write extra tooling, that I'd argue they shouldn't be compared to pretty much most of the usage of Ruby/Rails out there

ano passadodiscuss

Have you ever written a web app in Rust? Most of the code is in a form of handlers that receive data, process the data and give some data back. There is rarely need to think about lifetimes or borrowing in these scenarios.

há 2 anosdiscuss

"the community" meaning one weirdo commenter you've seen on HN? Cause I can assure you no people I know in the Rust community think that way.

Personally I would really like to code some stuff in Zig if I had more time. It's not really appealing to me in many ways (like I prefer to spend a bit more on designing types for my programs and have safety guartantees), so I wouldn't probably ue it long term, but I admit stuff like comptime is interesting.

há 2 anosdiscuss

At some point there was a discussion about compile time reflection, which I guess could include functionality like that, but I think the topic died along with some kind of drama around it. Quite a bummer, cause things like serde would have been so much easier to imeplement with compile time reflection

há 2 anosdiscuss

Hard to say at this point, but I really doubt it will be ever faster than SpiderMonkey or V8 with JIT enabled. Modern JavaScript compilers are quite good at optimizing hot paths through JIT. The use case of this project is to be able to run JavaScript in WebAssembly sandboxed environment. Like, for example Shopify allows you to extend their backend code using WebAssembly, but there is a binary limit capped at 250KBs. At that size you can't really use JavaScript at the moment, cause even simple interpreters like QuickJS take a few MBs compiled to WASM.

há 2 anosdiscuss

Rust is often used for things that you wouldn't necessarily use C++, though. Web backends (but mostly APIs at least as far as I've seen), CLI tools, various bots (like at my day job we have a Discord bot written in Rust) etc.

há 2 anosdiscuss

Yup, that's something that I would definitely like to do. In performance critical applications adding type information can speed up things quite a lot, especially when you think about numbers. At the moment I have to pass numbers as structs with one f64 field, because an argument to a function in Javascript can be any available type. If the type is specified, the signature or return type can use f64 types directly and don't even do heap allocations. But even for heap allocated types it may result in better performance, cause at the moment for each object I have to check what type it is and what path to take in order to proceed.

há 2 anosdiscuss

Coming from an actual JAWS user that has a lot more validity and if you say it will make it harder for people, I will definitely consider changing the name. I actually like Jawsm or JAWSM, so if @benmccann is fine with it, I will probably rename

há 2 anosdiscuss

I haven't seen Wasmnizer before. This looks like a cool project and I'll be definitely taking a closer look when I have some time, but for now I just took a quick peek.

The main difference is obviously TypeScript vs JavaScript. Because they are not bothering with JavaScript, some stuff is much easier, like for example if a function specifies an argument as `number`, you can statically compile it to use a type representing a number (possibly even without heap allocations) instead of passing something like `anyref` everywhere and doing typechecks.

The second big difference is that they seem to use types imported form the host. This means they can implement part of the types/builtins/methods on the host (which is easier, cause in JavaScript you simply use JavaScript for defining host stuff) at a cost of doing more calls from WASM to the host. And then you need the host to implement those functions (here is an example for JS host: https://github.com/web-devkits/Wasmnizer-ts/blob/main/tools/...). My plan for Jaws is to only rely on WASI, so that you can run your program on any runtime that supports WASI.

I'm also not sure about their approach to semantics. I can't quite grasp how they implement for example scopes. I tried to compile a small TS script that relies on scope, like:

  let message: string = 'Hello, World!';

  function test() {
    console.log(message);
  }

  test()

And the result was console.log printing null. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or is it expected, but I'll ask them in an issue later.

há 2 anosdiscuss

I haven't seen Static Hermes before, I'll take a look, thanks for the link!

With regards to porffor. It's a very good project and people behind it are probably much better at writing interpreters/compilers, but the biggest difference is in what WASM features the projects use. porffor uses only core WASM, which means they have to implement a lot more features themselves. Data types like arrays, structs/objects, garbage collection, exception handling etc. I am using WASM features added in proposals standardized very recently, like WASM GC or exception handling, which means I get a lot of the features almost for free. And I suppose that's also why semantics like scopes/closures are really hard to do for projects like porffor or even AssemblyScript and were relatively easy in Jaws.

The trade off is mainly in support. porffor compiled binaries can run on a lot of different WASM runtimes, I think there are even some runtimes for Core WASM for embedded devices. In case of Jaws, the runtime needs to support the proposals I use. Currently there are only two runtimes, that I know of, supporting both WASM GC and exception handling: V8 and WasmEdge. I believe more runtimes will get there, like for example WasmTime people are working towards exception handling, but it will take some time. Which is not a problem for me, cause it will definitely take a bit to reach any production level JS compatibility - I think the runtimes will have time to catch up with the proposals by then.

há 2 anosdiscuss

Hyped and visible on socials doesn't necessarily mean it's widely used, but I guess it also depends on how you define widely. According to most stats I've seen Rust usage is maybe about 5-10% of languages like JavaScript and Python when you look at StackOverflow, indexes like PyPl, or GitHub statistics.