[Evergreen-dev] OpenSRF / Redis / Rust

[Shula Link]

I'm working through the Rust Tutorial right now, actually. I'd be
interested in possibly joining the Order of Rusty Evergreen as an assessor.

Shula Link (she/her)
Systems Services Librarian
Greater Clarks Hill Regional Library
slink at columbiacountyga.gov | slink at gchrl.org
706-447-6702


On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 5:34 PM Bill Erickson via Evergreen-dev <
evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 9:10 AM Galen Charlton via Evergreen-dev <
> evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I hesitated to start with "replace all the C", but you're right.  Either
> we adopt it or we don't.  Having a full investment plan is way better than
> waiting to see what sticks.
>
> For my part, I'm all in.  Replacing C is foremost on my mind, but once
> we're accustomed to using Rust, I could see it moving beyond the
> traditional C borders of "must be fast" into more general purpose API /
> utility coding.  (For some things, anyway.  It is decidedly not a rapid
> prototyping language).
>
> For the curious, here's an implementation of the
> "open-ils.actor.get_barcodes" API based on my OpenSRF / Evergreen Rust code:
>
>
> https://github.com/kcls/evergreen-universe-rs/blob/main/evergreen/src/bin/eg-svc-rspub/methods.rs#L150
>
> It should seem familiar, Rust syntax notwithstanding.
>
> But back to the topic at hand...
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Yes, the ecosystem is young and in flux.  This could be a challenge,
> especially in the short term.  A perfectly reasonable argument against
> going in too fast and half-baked.
>
> I'm not so concerned about the number of dependencies, though.  OpenSRF
> has about 27 Perl dependencies in the Makefile, plus whatever they depend
> on.  It's to be expected, to some extent.  And as the ecosystem matures, I
> would expect versioning conflicts to diminish.
>
> I would also hesitate to compare Rust too closely to Node/Angular.  I
> think we can agree that Node is kind of special :\  My node_modules
> directory has 815 package directories. And, for added fun, an additional
> 152 node_modules subdirectories within those packages. I mean...
>
> My main concerns, which are echoed in other responses to this thread:
>
> 1. Packaging / Release Building
> 2. Relative youth of the language and the ecosystem.
> 3. Community developer mindshare
>
> The first 2 can be accomplished with time and effort.  #3 requires a
> conscious decision on our part and, to some extent, should probably happen
> first.  So I guess the REAL ;) question is: who wants to join my Rust Seal
> Strike Force 6 Team Thunder Brigade  to learn the language and assess its
> viability as a general-purpose language for OpenSRF / Evergreen?
>
> I really appreciate all the thoughts and feedback!
>
> -b
>
>
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