mirror of
https://github.com/wezm/wezm.net.git
synced 2024-11-10 09:52:32 +00:00
307 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
307 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
## Supporting Rust by using Rust: An exploration of great tools written in Rust
|
|
|
|
I presented at the September [Melbourne Rust Meetup][rust-melbourne]. My talk
|
|
was about some of the great tools that are being built in Rust, the benefits
|
|
that brings and how using and promoting these tools can help
|
|
with the wider adoption of Rust in the development community. I demonstrated
|
|
a selection of such tools.
|
|
|
|
A video of the talk will be made available, but it's not ready yet.
|
|
|
|
The [slides are available online][slides]. The presenter notes I wrote for
|
|
myself are included below.
|
|
|
|
[rust-melbourne]: https://www.meetup.com/Rust-Melbourne/
|
|
[slides]: /technical/2017/09/rust-tools-talk/slides/
|
|
|
|
## Slide Notes
|
|
|
|
### Promoting Rust
|
|
|
|
* Rust is new, most of us here probably think its great. Some of us would even
|
|
like to be able to work on Rust projects in our day jobs.
|
|
* To help cement its future, get more people using it at work and get more jobs
|
|
we need it to be successful.
|
|
* Some ways that we can help are:
|
|
* Use tools that are written in Rust
|
|
* Promote tools that are written in Rust. Someone asks what tool should I
|
|
use search code: Suggest ripgrep
|
|
* We'll be looking at a few that I use tonight.
|
|
* Mostly command line tools. GUI apps in Rust are possible but it's still
|
|
very early days.
|
|
|
|
### Why Rust tools are great
|
|
|
|
* Performance
|
|
* Fast and efficient with resources
|
|
* Fearless concurrency
|
|
* No runtime
|
|
* Often just a single binary, no need to install ruby, python, node, etc.
|
|
* Cross Platform
|
|
* Linux, macOS, BSD and often Windows
|
|
* Easy to install
|
|
* No need for npm, gem, pip. Just `cargo install` or better yet
|
|
install with system package manager where available
|
|
* Usable
|
|
* cargo makes it easy to pull in crates that do:
|
|
* command line argument parsing with shell completion and built in help
|
|
* generate coloured output
|
|
|
|
### Demos
|
|
|
|
Some notes on the demos that I'll be performing:
|
|
|
|
* Examples will be shell and UNIX focussed as that's the env I use every day.
|
|
I'm demoing on Linux but most of these tools will work on macOS, BSD and many
|
|
on Windows too.
|
|
* I'm going to assume you're familiar with the UNIX shell, cargo,
|
|
and git. If anything is foreign, feel free to ask.
|
|
* Whilst I'll mostly be demoing on the command line, many of these tools can be
|
|
integrated into your editor of choice, for me this is Neovim.
|
|
* For examples intended to operate on file trees I'm using a recent git
|
|
checkout as the sample tree. In the version I checked out there are 11002
|
|
files amounting to 404Mb on disk.
|
|
|
|
#### watchexec - Executes commands in response to file modifications
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/mattgreen/watchexec>
|
|
|
|
* Epitomises many of the features touted previously.
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
Watch rust dir, echo changed files on touch
|
|
|
|
watchexec -w src 'echo $WATCHEXEC_UPDATED_PATH'
|
|
|
|
Other terminal:
|
|
|
|
touch src/libstd/collections/hash/map.rs
|
|
touch src/libstd/collections/hash/set.rs
|
|
|
|
#### fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/sharkdp/fd>
|
|
|
|
You might be familiar with `find`, for finding files by name:
|
|
|
|
find . -name '*option*'
|
|
|
|
It's pretty quick but there's a bunch of typing for the common case of just
|
|
wanting a partial match on filename.
|
|
|
|
`fd` does the same thing with a simple interface for that common case, while
|
|
honoring `.gitignore`, coloured output and smart case for matching (no need for
|
|
`iname`/`name`.
|
|
|
|
fd option
|
|
|
|
The pattern is a regular expression instead of a glob. The current directory is
|
|
the implied path to search if not specified.
|
|
|
|
#### fe - A super-fast and easy to use fuzzy file searcher
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/btipling/fe>
|
|
|
|
`fe` is similar to `fd` except that it's a fuzzy matcher. It uses a smart fuzzy
|
|
search algorithm similar to that used in IDEs and editors for finding files.
|
|
|
|
> Searches start matching at word start, and on match failure stop matching
|
|
> until the next word
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
fe lopt
|
|
|
|
You can see we got fewer results with a shorter pattern.
|
|
|
|
#### exa - a modern replacement for ls
|
|
|
|
<https://the.exa.website/>
|
|
|
|
`exa` is a replacement for `ls` with helpful defaults like human readable
|
|
files sizes, colourized output for permissions, file type, and a tree view.
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
exa -lh
|
|
|
|
Here we see exas table output (-l). (-h) adds headers. You can see that
|
|
colour is used to help group similar concepts.
|
|
|
|
Tree view:
|
|
|
|
exa --tree src/etc/installer
|
|
|
|
Colour scale for file sizes:
|
|
|
|
exa -l --colour-scale ~/Downloads
|
|
|
|
The larger the file the more intense the colour, shifting from green to yellow.
|
|
|
|
It also has git integration and can show the status of files tracked in git.
|
|
|
|
`exa` calls itself a replacement for `ls`, which I think is accurate. I have `ls`
|
|
aliased to it in my shell:
|
|
|
|
which ls
|
|
|
|
#### rg - the usability of The Silver Searcher with the raw speed of [GNU] grep.
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/>
|
|
|
|
You may have heard of `ack`, or the silver searcher. They are tools to rapidly
|
|
search the content of files in a directory tree, often code. A faster version
|
|
of `grep -r` that ignores binary files, files ignored by git ignore file
|
|
ripgrep is a similar tool: Fast code
|
|
search (regex) honoring git ignore without optional filtering by language.
|
|
|
|
Great blog post by the author (Andrew Gallant) that compared ripgreps performance and
|
|
correctness to similar tools.
|
|
|
|
Example 1:
|
|
|
|
rg Option
|
|
|
|
If you blinked you may have missed that but about 11,000 were checked.
|
|
|
|
Example 2:
|
|
|
|
rg è
|
|
|
|
`rg` has complete support for Unicode
|
|
|
|
Example 3:
|
|
|
|
ripgrep knows about file types and regexes so if we want all function that contain into
|
|
and return a String (on one line):
|
|
|
|
rg -t rust 'fn.+into.+-> String'
|
|
|
|
|
|
#### alt - Command line tool to find alternate files
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/uptech/alt>
|
|
|
|
`alt` prints the alternate for a file. Has editor integration so you can do it
|
|
in you favourite editor (Neovim). Works well for languages that have file
|
|
pairs. In my case I work on Ruby apps, which have spec files in a tree
|
|
mirroring the app tree. For example in pkb, which is a Rails app I wrote:
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
alt app/models/page.rb
|
|
|
|
Ignore the trailing %, that's my shell telling me the output didn't end in a
|
|
new line. This one is super helpful in your editor to switch to the "alternate file".
|
|
|
|
#### tac
|
|
|
|
<https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/a-high-performance-cross-platform-tac-rewrite/>
|
|
|
|
`tac` is a Rust implementation of the tool with the same name commonly only found on
|
|
Linux systems. It prints the lines of a files in reverse. This can come in handy
|
|
when dealing with large log files.
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
We have a 3.8Gb log file. We want to see the last request in the log that was
|
|
made by a visitor using the Opera web browser with the Presto rendering engine:
|
|
|
|
grep Presto ~/Documents/webserver.log | tail -n1
|
|
|
|
That's great but it took a little while, we can do better with `tac`:
|
|
|
|
tac ~/Documents/webserver.log | grep Presto | head -n1
|
|
|
|
Yay quick!
|
|
|
|
#### dot - Yet another management tool for dotfiles
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/ubnt-intrepid/dot>
|
|
|
|
Dot is a dot file manager. It can automatically clone a git repo then
|
|
symlink the files according to a mappings file. You can have mappings
|
|
that are OS specific. It's a single binary so downloading and bootstrapping
|
|
a new system is easy.
|
|
|
|
Hard to demo but my dotfiles are managed with it:
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/wezm/dotfiles>
|
|
|
|
#### titlecase - Capitalise text according to a style guide
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/wezm/titlecase>
|
|
|
|
* Shameless self promotion. A rust implementation of John Gruber's title case
|
|
style. There are several implementations around (Perl, JavaScript, Python)
|
|
I wanted a nice single binary version.
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
In vim filter some text through it:
|
|
|
|
Before:
|
|
|
|
The iPhone X: "a detailed guide to designing for a notch"
|
|
|
|
After:
|
|
|
|
The iPhone X: "A Detailed Guide to Designing for a Notch"
|
|
|
|
vim demos/titlecase.md
|
|
# duplicate the line so you can see before and after
|
|
:'<,'>!titlecase
|
|
|
|
Notes:
|
|
|
|
* It left iPhone alone
|
|
* It capitalised the initial A inside the quotes by not _to_, _for_ and the _a_ inside the quotes.
|
|
|
|
#### ion shell - A shell written in Rust for Redox and Linux
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/redox-os/ion>
|
|
|
|
Lastly if you feel like living on the edge... There is a project called
|
|
Redox to build an operating system in Rust. They've made a stack of progress
|
|
so far and one of the components they've build is a shell called ion, which
|
|
also runs on Linux. It has some neat features reminiscent of the `fish` shell.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
ls
|
|
ls -lh
|
|
which ls
|
|
|
|
As you can see it works, it's not full of features yet so probably not ready for
|
|
full time use. Maybe try it out to hep test it, report any issues you find.
|
|
|
|
#### wesers - Single file webserver
|
|
|
|
<https://github.com/wdv4758h/wesers>
|
|
|
|
Depending on time:
|
|
|
|
* The slides were served by a little web server called `wesers`.
|
|
* Single file download
|
|
* Run in a directory to serve that directory
|
|
|
|
### Are you the next great tool author
|
|
|
|
* We've just looked at a bunch of handy tools.
|
|
* Each of these was prompted by someone that wanted a better, faster, easier to
|
|
install, or wider platform option to existing tools and built it.
|
|
* You can also build these tools
|
|
* If you use a tool that is frustrating to install due to runtime
|
|
requirements or dependency issues, perhaps its a candidate for a Rust
|
|
version.
|
|
* Use a tool that is error prone or could benefit from fearless
|
|
concurrency.
|
|
|
|
### Conclusion
|
|
|
|
* Talked about some great tools
|
|
* Try them out
|
|
* Recommend them if they work well for you
|
|
* Improve them, submit PRs
|