Top all-time · #3499
Mara's Blog
Personal blog · blog.m-ou.seprogrammingsystems
Mara's Blog is a personal blog at blog.m-ou.se about programming and systems. Since 2020, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Do we need a “Rust Standard”?”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mara Bos's posts on why Rust needs a formal language specification and on Rust being volunteer-driven. Commenters cite them as support for their own points about Rust.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Do we need a “Rust Standard”?5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-10-26
- Writing Python inside Rust4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-04-17
- Rust Temporary Lifetimes and "Super Let"4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-09
- Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-10
- Rust is not a company2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-18
- Comparing Rust's and C++'s Concurrency Library2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-16
- Behind the scenes of Rust string formatting and format_args ()2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-05
What Hacker News says?
In my understanding it would be hard to make the case that Rust actually has more undefined behavior than C -- most kinds of undefined behavior in C have been carefully avoided in Rust, although, yes, there is no piece of paper ratified by a bunch of national technology institutes that describes Rust. See also this recent blog post: https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-standard/
Comment linking /rust-standard/
on “OpenSSL 3.0.7 fixes X.509 email address buffer overflows”Submitted Writing Python inside Rust as a story · 187 points
HN discussionHmm. Some folks have hacked the Rust macro system to get whitespace-sensitivity for embedded Python. https://blog.m-ou.se/writing-python-inside-rust-1/ I wonder how much of the CoffeeScript syntax you could pack in there...
Comment linking /writing-python-inside-rust-1/
on “Coffee Rust”Submitted Rust is not a company as a story · 102 points
HN discussionRust's leadership wanted a formal specification. They thought it's reasonable. Hence, why they invested in a team to build a spec https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/11/15/spec-visio... One of the founding members wrote a blog post & RFC which gives some good reasons why a spec is needed https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-standard https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3355-rust-spec.html
Comment linking /rust-standard
on “Rust in 2025: Targeting foundational software”Submitted Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus as a story · 93 points
HN discussionRust needs a language standard: https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-standard/ https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3355-rust-spec.html https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355 There are many organizations and industries that will not adopt Rust until it has a standard. C, C++, C#, and even JavaScript (ECMAScript) have language standards. Why shouldn't Rust have one too? C: https://www.iso.org/standard/74528.html C++: https://i…
Comment linking /rust-standard/
on “Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler”Submitted Do we need a “Rust Standard”? as a story · 40 points
HN discussionInteresting, thanks for the links! I'm curious as to how many of the apparent issues are attributable to lifetime extension specifically as opposed to something else like async-related deadlocks as mentioned in the parent to the first linked comment (which I feel I've heard much more about), especially after the Rust 2024 changes. That being said, after a bit more searching I found this 2023 blog from one of the Rus…
Comment linking /super-let/
on “Canonical Backs New Project to Translate Large C Codebases into Safe Rust”Submitted Comparing Rust's and C++'s Concurrency Library as a story · 30 points
HN discussionAn RFC was recently merged to unblock this: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3963 The implementation on this has started. Something to keep in mind is https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-is-not-a-company/ . Rust is mostly driven by volunteers working on what they find interesting. Boring/uninteresting tasks depend on funding, a warm body to accept the funding, and a reviewer.
Comment linking /rust-is-not-a-company/
on “GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io”Submitted Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus (2022) as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> 30 to 80 millions LOC compiled I figured it was because "line of code" is not all that meaningful, and not worth specifying more precisely than that. Does it include comments? Is it after macro expansion? What about \ continuations? Does a bare "}" on its own count as a line of code? BTW, how many LOC does Crater run in a full test, and how long does it take/how expensive is a run? I failed to find that informatio…
Comment linking /rust-standard/
on “Trip Summer ISO C++ standards meeting (Varna, Bulgaria)”Submitted Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus as a story · 9 points
HN discussionTo follow your recommendation would require defining Rust as a memory-safer language, not as the language of memory safety. That will take time due to history. Defining safety was stonewalled by the previous maintainers of Rust who enshrined their nebulous idea of safety as the source of the language's identity. These maintainers focused their efforts on evangelizing and expanding Rust, at the expense of governing i…
Comment linking /rust-standard/
on “Safety and Soundness in Rust”Submitted Writing Python inside your Rust code – Part 1 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBlaming the followers for not reading the docs is an easy excuse, when the real problem is that the leaders have failed to define Python. The PSF needs to decide what precisely Python is and what it isn't among themselves. Because they did not do so, they can't tell if something is a bug or intentional. See this entire thread as proof. In lieu of a formal definition, the maintainers resort to a hodgepodge of user do…
Comment linking /rust-standard/
on “The Heisenbug lurking in your async code (Python)”Submitted Behind the scenes of Rust string formatting and format_args () as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rust Temporary Lifetimes and "Super Let" as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rust Temporary Lifetimes and "Super Let" as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rust Temporary Lifetimes and "Super Let" as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing Python inside your Rust code (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparing Rust's and C++'s Concurrency Library as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing Python inside your Rust code – Part 3 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing Python inside your Rust code – Part 2 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Behind the Scenes of Rust String Formatting: Format_args () as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing Python inside your Rust code – Part 4 as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
