I think you nailed it. I wake up each morning consumed with anxiety, thinking to myself, "how do I become relevant?" Clearly, having shipped advanced multilingual typesetting capabilities to billions of users didn't do it, nor developing high performance GPU rendering algorithms, nor having made a popular programming font. But posting a language comparison to Hacker News, that should put me on the map.
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Face it, your work will never be as immortal as autotools.
You also bet on wrong languages. M4 is battle-tested, stood the test of time, and is much more stable.
You are right, and that is an excellent way to state my goals: I hope to create systems that have as much lasting impact as autotools.
That said, for those of us that don't have the luxury of working only in Rust, the cargo monoculture is a problem.
Or more precisely, as a result of that monoculture there is a single implementation of build.rs and it cannot interoperate with anything else. If cargo could optionally generate a build.ninja file or some JSON with the command it runs, it would be so much easier.
This is in fact one part of the post that was based on an unironic kernel of truth. I've wrestled with this more than most people. In particular I tried to fit cargo into the Fuchsia build system, with only partial success. That approach has been abandoned and Fuchsia now translates Cargo manifests into GN build rules, which seems to be the prevailing approach for polyglot builds, especially with Bazel.
However, the experience when doing pure Rust is night and day compared with stuff like CMake. And even in a polyglot build, the Cargo manifest is a reasonably good starting point, as argued recently by matklad[1].
Obviously, build systems and package managers at large scale are very challenging to get right, otherwise we'd have a good solution by now. I personally think Bazel is a pretty good step in the right direction, but it's very clunky and awkward for smaller projects. I found Neil Mitchell's classification[2] useful. Cargo is best-in-class for the "small" and arguably "medium" cases, but starts showing its limitations beyond that. Bazel is the reverse, one of the few really workable choices for "huge" but not a great experience otherwise.
[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2023/03/28/rust-is-a-scalable-lang...
[2]: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2021/09/small-project-buil...
Do you have a pointer for the translation? As soon as you have a transitive dependency on libc or any other Rust binding to a C library that approach would seem to fail due to the presence of build.rs.
Yes, the tool is cargo-gnaw. It does not evaluate build.rs files itself, but there is a process for evaluating them at the time the crate is vendored.
https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/master/tools/carg...
Yeah that's very much a special-purpose tool and cannot be used if for example the build.rs file has different output for Linux/macOS/Windows.
I like the Meson model where the meta-build system is opinionated (not as much as cargo in the case of Meson, but still quite a bit) but, at the same time, it doesn't itself take care of the build. The build is done via build.ninja, static analysis and other tools use compile_commands.json. There is no reason why cargo couldn't work this way and even preserve the same command line interface.
I wouldn't be surprised if he worked with autotools and m4 when working on, for example, an early version of GNOME's librsvg. Seriously, I was looking at a librsvg header file a couple months ago and was surprised to find his name.
Your work will never be as immortal as cockroaches and viruses either.
I thought a sense of humor and maybe a little bit of a thick skin would be required if you want to partake into April fools bashing. Who's taking oneself seriously now...
Don't let the haters get to you. You and your work are awesome.
Holy crap, imagine being this insecure.
One time someone left a comment on one of my videos that was like "I don't like the sound you make when you drink water." And now whenever I look back at that video, I remember that comment, every time. It's wild how the mind works.
I don't know what it is called I just know the sound it makes when it goes down a man's throat.
Yeah, it's no walk in the park, let me tell you that.