Sean McArthur, author of the Rust libraries hyper, warp, and reqwest, writes about Rust, HTTP, and async programming.
HN links his async fn post and his HTTP library announcements. Commenters debate the tone of a critique of hyper's unsafe code.
There’s a small message contained in that unnecessarily long post - that maybe a popular library used for HTTP in Rust could use less unsafe.
There was no need for this half mocking, half condescending tone. If the author wanted an explanation for a technical decision, they could open an issue and have a conversation like an adult. Instead we’re left with their speculation that leads nowhere. They cry about the existence of some unsafe code, but don’t actually put in the effort to figure out if it can lead to a real problem like unsoundness. And somehow the title implies that they’re saying something profound about the entire rust ecosystem when they just looked at one library. It’s just innuendo, as far as I could tell.
Here’s a post by the maintainer of hyper about what they accomplished in 2023 and what they hope to accomplish in 2024 - https://seanmonstar.com/blog/2023-in-review/
If this work interests you, or you depend on hyper in production like many companies do, then consider sponsoring them! Or maybe you could give back to the commons by submitting PRs that fix issues you’ve found. Or even a good bug report would be appreciated.
But not this kind of article. This article helps no one and does nothing constructive. We all benefit from the work that open source maintainers put in. They have it hard enough without having to read low effort posts trashing their work. Be better.
> If the author wanted an explanation for a technical decision, they could open an issue and have a conversation like an adult.
Opening an issue comes across as a whole lot more aggressive to me. That implies that they owe you an explanation or you want them to change their code.
> They cry about the existence of some unsafe code, but don’t actually put in the effort to figure out if it can lead to a real problem like unsoundness.
unsafe might as well be unsound. The key benefit of Rust is supposed to be better memory safety than C; if everything is using unsafe, why bother?
> Here’s a post by the maintainer of hyper about what they accomplished in 2023 and what they hope to accomplish in 2024 - https://seanmonstar.com/blog/2023-in-review/
Ok, and that doesn't mention "unsafe" once - no justification for why it's used, much less a plan to reduce or eliminate it.
> Just so you're aware, C++ has three keywords here: co_async, co_await, and co_return...
This is admittedly an unimportant correction to what you said that doesn't in any way change your point; and yet, I still think it is an important one to keep in mind for people who only might end up with an indirect understanding of the C++ feature: C++ additionally chose to add a specialized co_yield... and specifically does not have co_async! This latter tradeoff then relates to the Rust discussions I have seen come up again recently due to the article "Was async fn a mistake?".
https://seanmonstar.com/post/66832922686/was-async-fn-a-mistake
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37789057
https://old.reddit.com/16ugwuc/
Speaking of HTTP clients, just yesterday the person behind Hyper announced their new high-level HTTP client crate: http://seanmonstar.com/post/153221119046/introducing-reqwest