• 1 Post
  • 16 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 24th, 2023

help-circle



  • Yep tinkering with the system is probably the main issue (for that NixOS is awesome btw.). But even when you’re not constantly tinkering. System-State accumulates over time, bugs are also apparent in (upgrading of) distros, and the maintainers of a distro cannot realistically handle every upgrade time-point x -> y, so stuff will likely break after some time.

    But even when I have fixed all the issues in my previous at some time broken distros, at some point it just feels good to have a freshly installed system without all that dirty accumulated state (NixOS + impermanence and you’ll have that every reboot :P, see also this)


  • You probably don’t have much on that system and/or you have a lot of discipline…

    I did reinstall it after max 1 1/2 years (Arch btw.), either because of breakage, or weird behavior, or it was a chaotic dumpster fire.

    At some point I discovered NixOS and was sold (and am still sold after 3 1/2 years using it). But it has a steep learning curve, though it certainly got better over that time.




  • It’s not for everyone. I think it’s almost a requirement to be a programmer, and to be familiar with functional programming. It also has quite a few (necessary?) quirks/magic (module system, overlays, typing, config overrides etc.).

    Actually one of my colleagues just switched from Pop OS! since System76 put all focus into their new desktop environment (while the current distro is barely maintained), which will be available on NixOS too, when it’s ready (which is his plan to use, and mine too).





  • Rust has exactly the same problems with depreciation as many Frameworks rely on experimental features which are subject to change.

    Rust has actually quite a good record with depreciation and backwards-compatibilty etc. They are changing the language in non-backwards compatible way over editions, but the changes are mostly very manageable.

    But to not end up being another C++ (syntax-wise it’s a disaster IMHO), a few non-backwards-compatible changes every few years are the way to go, when it’s manageable.


  • Learning curve is steep in the beginning, I agree (I wouldn’t argue painful though, maybe if you have to unlearn bad practices, like interior mutability though etc.).

    But I think it pays off after some time. I’m now faster in Rust than in C# with similar experience, and the quality of the code is definitely higher as well (which can be credited to the strict kinda opinionated design of Rust IMO).

    It composes really well, better than most (non-functional) popular languages. I think this is probably the Sell for Rust, as it additionally works remarkably well over the entire stack (kernel -> frontend) (in each abstraction level might be better/easier to use languages to be fair though).



  • I’m not speaking for Rust level performance. I’m using Rust nowadays, because it’s generally doing a lot right, that other popular languages struggle with IMO.

    Think about error handling. I think even Java is better here than C#. I think it’s quite a mistake, not being required to add all possible exception types that a function can throw to the function signature.

    Then the next thing, I really hate about almost every popular language is implicit null. To be really safe, you have to check every (non-primitive) variable for null before using it, otherwise you have a potential NullPointerException.

    Then take pattern matching, this is a baked in feature of Rust from the beginning and it does this really well (exhaustive matching etc.). There’s “basic” pattern matching in C#, but it just doesn’t really feel right in the language, and is not even close in capability compared to Rusts.

    All of this (and more) makes Rust the less error-prone language, which I can say with confidence after long experience with both of these languages (both > 5 years).

    I’m honestly not sure why exactly C# was chosen for most of the games, but it’s probably because it’s relatively good to embed, is relatively strong-typed, while being somewhat performant (compared to something like python or other scripting languages).