Rust in the 6.2 kernel [LWN.net]

Rust in the 6.2 kernel

Posted Nov 21, 2022 17:06 UTC (Mon) by steveklabnik (guest, #114343)
In reply to: Rust in the 6.2 kernel by gasche
Parent article: Rust in the 6.2 kernel

A small amount of history here: Rust *did* include Either in its standard library long, long ago. https://doc.rust-lang.org/0.7/std/either.html

My recollection of its removal was a survey of usage, and Result was used instead by 99.9% of the existing code instead.

That said, it is true that the crates.io has high usage; it is the dependent of two *extremely* popular packages, itertools and rayon. I'm not aware of any movement to move it back into the standard library, though.

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Rust in the 6.2 kernel

Posted Nov 21, 2022 21:16 UTC (Mon) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (1 responses)

Looking at the Either crate api, it’s awful. At least Result gives you a meaningful name for each variant (ok, err).
Either gives you a... left and a right. Which is which? If both have the same content type, how do you differentiate?
By the way, some people (like me) can’t tell the right from the left. Or rather can’t give them a name (but never will for example drive on the wrong side of the road). I had to work on codd which used an Either type in another language and could never manage to understand any of it even after multiple years.
I guess it’self OK as write-only code...

Rust in the 6.2 kernel

Posted Nov 22, 2022 14:11 UTC (Tue) by TheGopher (subscriber, #59256) [Link]

Agree. Having worked with either in scala I can say that the overhead of a dedicated struct/union/variant is minimal - and the readability is much higher! This is the wrong place to be lazy.