[gw98]

I know the point of this article is to demonstrate how to solve a problem but the premise is a bad one and must not be confused with sound software architecture at all. In fact it's slightly painful reading it and I really wish people would stop writing articles like this.

The functional requirement here is to take some HTML, parse it and emit slack flavoured markdown.

Involving WASM / Rust / cross compiling stuff and fucking around with a build tool chain should not even be being discussed anywhere as a solution for this. I mean it's fine as a toy but the problem is that half the industry doesn't have any idea what's a good idea and what isn't from an engineering perspective when it comes to solving problems and this will be taken as gospel on how to solve the thing.

What we have here is a Rube Goldberg machine, not a cleanly solved engineering problem.

[xena]

The article is tagged cursed for a reason. This is not intended to be a good solution, it is intended to be _a solution_ that works better than you'd expect while also explaining the Unix philosophy and going through my entire thought process into making it.

The best kinds of hacks are the ones that look ludicrous but are actually somewhat fine in practice.

[mediocregopher]

It's very clearly a toy example to demonstrate the idea, and it does so well.

> What we have here is a Rube Goldberg machine, not a cleanly solved engineering problem.

And what _we_ have here is unfounded indignation over a perfectly fine way to solve a problem. People have been using linked libraries to re-use code across languages since forever, it's fine. This solution isn't very different, it just makes shipping easier.

As a parting comment, "sound software architecture" is not a decided upon principle which can be empirically determined, and if it was we'd all be out of a job.

[gw98]

> And what _we_ have here is unfounded indignation over a perfectly fine way to solve a problem

Absolutely no way is this a fine way to solve the problem. That is crazy talk.

1. It introduces additional toolchains into the solution when it is unnecessary.

2. It now means you need multiple language specialists to maintain it and associated communications and context switching.

3. More interfaces and integration means more fragility when it comes to debugging, problem solving as well as increasing the problem surface.

4. It massively increases the dependency stack which means there are now multiple sets of supply chain issues and patching required.

This makes no problems easier at all! It's even a bad last resort if that's all you have left to try.

Sound software architecture is very very well defined and this is definitely not it. I have seen entire companies burn by taking this approach to problem solving.

I'm really getting tired of solutions before problems and this is a fundamental example of it. Give us a real use case not manufacture a problem for it.

[morelisp]

> People have been using linked libraries to re-use code across languages since forever, it's a fine way to solve problems.

People have been doing it forever, but people have also hated it forever. Twenty years ago you saw SWIG in a build, you'd know you were probably in for a bad time in an exciting new way.

[kibwen]

This appears to be a straw man. Nobody is trying to tell you to rewrite your software stack using this technique. The OP demonstrates a cool hack. The site we currently occupying is a place for cool hacks. I don't see the problem. As far as hacks go, it's far from the most egregious that I've seen, and even suggests a few thoughtful lessons about the future of FFI beyond the C ABI.

[ilyt]

> The functional requirement here is to take some HTML, parse it and emit slack flavoured markdown.

That is solved already and not what the article is about

The nonfunctional requirement is a self-contained binary that is not dependent on machine's own libraries or any extra files. That's not just mental excercise but a feature.

That is what article is about.

The "proper" engineering solution might be very well "just rewrite that small part in Go", but this approach is nonetheless interesting.

[mk89]

> The nonfunctional requirement is a self-contained binary that is not dependent on machine's own libraries or any extra files. That's not just mental excercise but a feature.

Let me add more to this: speed.

You have Rust/WebAsssembly in the mix and automatically you gain in speed as shown in the article.

I honestly don't understand the negative comments.

If you build a lib in C and then you use standard binding mechanisms, oh it's ok. In this case you leverage a great tool (cargo) to do the heavy lifting for you and bam you get a safe binary that gives you better performance and overall better tooling -> it's bad.... why?

I read the original version of the poster's comment and it was way more aggressive and more about "sound architecture". Maybe he/she can explain what exactly is wrong with this approach and what other approach should be taken instead?

> The "proper" engineering solution might be very well "just rewrite that small part in Go", but this approach is nonetheless interesting.

Why? In this case it's a trivial function. What if it's a strong algorithm that needs speed? Rust helps there, and it's faster than Go.

[morelisp]

It's the flattening of everything.

For a system architect or senior developer it's very interesting to know I might glue a (not so trivial) Rust codebase into my Go program so easily. For people actually working on Go, Rust, WASM, etc., these are also experiments to evaluate the ergonomics, performance, etc. of all the tooling. For someone who wants to learn how FFIs work, this is a great tutorial.

But I'm certain I will now get at least one mid-level dev or interview candidate actually try to do this, in a similarly trivial case. And I will have to explain yes you already wrote the whole build pipeline but no we're not going to maintain it, and yes the blog post says it's fast but it's not really that fast, and etc. etc. It's bad enough every time I have to hear "it's just one Python script, what could it cost?", but the more complex it gets the more energy it takes to genuinely convince (rather than merely authoritatively declare) people not to do it, and the limit there seems unbounded.

[zaarn]

This is a toy example to demonstrate a framework to build with. But I don't think it's not a cleanly solved engineering problem. Instead of reinventing xer Rust code in Go, Xe has simply taken the functional rust code and made go run it in a cross-platform and portable manner. Minimal effort from the engineer has been expended to solve this and C was not involved for FFI definitions either.

[nuc1e0n]

I don't care for the eccentricities of the Rust community, but this is a good article that demonstrates an effective approach to invoke code from one language to another. The problem is a toy one that's not the focus here. The focus is a better means of doing interop

[morelisp]

> Minimal effort from the engineer has been expended

Is the definition of "how do I get promoted in a company where I don't care if it survives the next five years", not "a cleanly solved engineering problem".

[dom96]

> Exactly. What the fuck even is this?

There is constructive criticism and then there is this. Once you use phrases like the above and follow it up by pontificating about how you think the author's house looks like, you have crossed a line, by far.

[ggm]

When I could write a single script in awk or Python I do still write cat < file | cut | awk | sed | wc (notice useless use of cat)