[Evergreen-dev] OpenSRF / Redis / Rust

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:08 AM Jason Boyer via Evergreen-dev <
evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:
> I know "should we replace all of the 'C'?" wasn't really Bill's original
question

... but I think this is the real question before us, or at least, close to
it.

If we move forward with the Rust router and websockets gateway and, two
years from now, we find that that's all there is that's written in Rust, in
my opinion it would not have been worth the concrete deployment and
packaging issues we would run into, especially on Debian. Rust and Cargo
are very much a moving target, and whatever you think of Debian's approach
to packing the Rust build environment, Debian's notion of a stable version
of Rust is clearly not new enough as compared to the rest of the Rust
ecosystem. Now, it's not the end of the world if we have to live with using
rustup to deploy on Debian, but that _is_ a tradeoff.

Similarly, the crate ecosystem is in great flux. One of the things I
discovered when I put Bill's branch out for a test drive today is that one
of the major dependencies of the Rust opensrf-websockets code,
https://crates.io/crates/websocket, is now effectively deprecated - in
part, because one of _its_ dependencies _will_ break in future versions of
Rust. Again, not the end of the world, as alternative libraries are
available, but we _will_ have a dependency treadmill to deal with similar
to the Node and Angular stuff. It looks like there are at least 101
dependencies among the entire Rust opensrf project.

Consequently, if we want a "better C", Rust clearly has a lot to offer -
but going down that path needs to be more about a full investment, not a
technology experiment that makes a couple components of OpenSRF be
different from the rest of the code.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Implementation and IT Manager
Equinox Open Library Initiative
gmc at equinoxOLI.org
https://www.equinoxOLI.org
phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
direct: 770-709-5581
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