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
      1·
      4 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·
          4 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·
            4 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·
                4 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.