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2024-03-29

I posted on Mastodon about feeling how I should get back into Rust, not because I like it (I don't) but because it seems like the only viable language for unifying all the kinds of software I write (web, system, embedded) while maybe being more suitable for "real" production than the kind of C that I write (buggy :p).

I've done a little trivial embedded stuff with Rust and so far I'm really hating it! Some of it is just being unfamiliar with the language and I am not being fair by trying to do a non-mainstream kind of development with it while not being very versed in Rust to begin with.

But the other part, I think, is the ecosystem. There's a maze of crates you can use to get things done, and they are at various levels of compatibility with each other and with the Rust compiler itself. This isn't the language's fault: no one forced me to add a dependency, but looking at the transitive graph of dependencies it seems like almost-leftpad-levels of dependency is here, at least in the embedded crates.

For the embedded libraries I've tried using (the `rp2040_hal`, part of the `embedded_hal` ecosystem) a large amount of the implementation is written by macros, which are kind-of inscrutable for a relative beginner like me, and lead to me being unable to find the definition of things without getting the IDE to help me. This is very familiar from my days of Rails programming, and one thing that's basically impossible in Go and that has made me _enjoy_ writing Go. You just can't be _that_ clever in Go.

I don't think you _have_ to be that clever in Rust, either, but I think there's people out there who enjoy it (good for them: I am getting their work for free, they should enjoy doing it) -- and as a user in the ecosystem you're immediately slammed into decisions about blocking vs. polling vs. async versions of APIs and crates the depend on one (or other) of these implementations.

idk. I guess this another rant. I'd like it to be something I look back on in a year, when I have reached Rust transcendance, and laugh at my naivity. I will perservere.