At Fri, 19 Jun 2020 21:07:24 +0200, Jan Danielsson <jan.m.danielsson%gmail.com@localhost> wrote: Subject: Re: Checking out src with Mercurial > > The tl;dr for those who don't want to read all that: If, five years > earlier, Rust had been in the shape it was when that post was written, > the Mercurial developers may have opted to port to Rust rather than try > to bend Python 3 to their will -- because many common assumptions they > made about Python were true in 2.x, but not 3.x. > > Regarding choosing Rust over "well designed C/C++ code": Going by > the blog, it seems some of their core developers really like Rust. I > imagine that the OsString/OsStr issue is probably quite relevant to > [portable] source management systems; probably things like that matter > to them. heh. I always thought at the beginnings of Mercurial that Python was only a suitable prototyping language for it and that a rewrite to C or better, at least for core functionality, should have been a VERY early step in a production implementation. But it just never got there, and then they suffered through the Python version gyrations with no appreciable gain. However considering Rust is, well.... Rust is a stupidly horribly overly complex language (and in a convoluted way unlike, say, D) that is currently very hard to support on a wide variety of platforms, unlike, say, Python which does run _everywhere_, even if slowly. However it isn't too hard to see how a Python-only developer would be intrigued by a language that's at least as capable as Python (in a "mine is as big as yours" kind of way). Now why they wouldn't prefer a truly safe language like, say, Ada (or Oberon or Eiffel, etc.), if that's their concern, I couldn't begin to guess. These days a decent well supported, very capable, and much more widely available language like Go would seem, to me at least, to be a literally more infinitely better choice. Of course a truly small and elegant language like V (or maybe Wren) would be more along my line of choice, though for the kind of project like Mercurial, well, as I said, I would have a very hard time arguing against Go. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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