July 2, 2024

Sylvain Kerkour writes:

Rust adoption is stagnating not because it’s missing some feature pushed by programming language theory enthusiasts, but because of a lack of focus on solving the practical problems that developers are facing every day.

… no company outside of AWS is making SDKs for Rust … it has no official HTTP library.

As a result of Rust’s lack of official packages, even its core infrastructure components need to import hundreds of third-party crates.

  • cargo imports over 400 crates.

  • crates.io has over 500 transitive dependencies.

…the offical libsignal (from the Signal messaging app) uses 500 third-party packages.

… what is really inside these packages. It has been found last month that among the 999 most popular packages on crates.io, the content of around 20% of these doesn’t even match the content of their Git repository.

…how I would do it (there may be better ways):

A stdx (for std eXtended) under the rust-lang organization containing the most-needed packages. … to make it secure: all packages in stdx can only import packages from std or stdx. No third-party imports. No supply-chain risks.

[stdx packages to include, among others]:

gzip, hex, http, json, net, rand

Read Rust has a HUGE supply chain security problem

Submitter’s note:

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

  • FizzyOrange
    34·
    6 months ago

    Rust adoption is stagnating

    Is it? I would like to see some evidence for that.

    because of [the small standard library and potentially supply chain security issues]

    Yeah I can guarantee that is not a significant reason for people to avoid Rust. If it was people wouldn’t use NPM, where the problem is even worse.

    I do think it would be good to putt some more stuff in the standard library makes sense, or even just add some kind of official sanction of de facto standard library crates like regex… But this author is an idiot.

    • v9CYKjLeia10dZpz88iU
      26·
      6 months ago

      Rust adoption is stagnating

      Is it? I would like to see some evidence for that.

      When comparing crates.io statistics

      Year Crates Yearly Crates Increase Downloads Yearly Downloads Increase
      2018 21,162 - 688,268,999 -
      2019 29,757 8,595 1,457,578,834 769,309,835
      2020 41,539 11,782 3,079,874,235 1,622,295,401
      2021 64,658 23,119 8,235,327,111 5,155,452,876
      2022 86,776 22,118 17,546,769,164 9,311,442,053
      2023 119,145 32,369 35,556,469,191 18,009,700,027
      2024 149,970 30,825 72,083,950,414 36,527,481,223

      By downloads, 2023-2024 has been Rust’s best year so far.

      • FizzyOrange
        1·
        5 months ago

        I am asking for some kind of official badge or something on crates.io. Currently it just looks like any other crate. Dart has a feature like this I believe.

        And regex was just an example. There are other crates that should be officially sanctioned but aren’t.

          • FizzyOrange
            1·
            5 months ago

            It would mean a fancy badge, ideally being listed in the official docs, and probably some kind of promise about maintaining it.

            It’s shown in the “owners”.

            This is just way too subtle IMO.

            • Soso@pouet.chapril.org
              11·
              5 months ago

              @FizzyOrange the Rust project is not an organisation you have a contract with. The only guarantee of maintenance you get are that of the MIT and Apache licenses.

                • Soso@pouet.chapril.org
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  @FizzyOrange My point is that regardless of whether it’s “blessed” by the Rust project, your only guarantee of maintenance is only that there are developers or other companies motivated to maintain the project. That also applies to individual parts of the standard library.

                  Just like with the non-blessed versions, you need to pay attention to who actually maintains it, and guess whether this crate or feature will be maintained in the long run.