Comment by johnisgood 14 hours ago
> Rust projects are easier to hack on and contribute to.
You can say that about any languages that you yourself know, or other people know. There are beautiful codebases in many other languages, and awful ones in the same languages.
If your Rust codebase has a lot of unwraps and lifetime annotations (among other things), I will probably not find it a joy to contribute to it, at all.
I do not know about Rust (because of all these lifetime and borrow checking stuff), but Go is definitely one of the languages one can easily contribute to without knowing much about the language, especially if you use VSCode with its Go extension.
I do not like C++ projects, they are behemoths, slow to compile, and C++ continues getting so much bullshit bolted on top of the language. It is extremely complicated, at least for me.
Most of my projects - regardless of language - has extremely simple build instructions, no matter how large it is.
As for GIMP, "meson" and "ninja" is not too bad, I have come across projects with much worse build instructions, but I agree, it is leaning towards "complicated".
> Once I started thinking about using a chroot to fix dependency issues after I'd already built bebl and gegl
Been there, done that. I remember compiling GCC myself, it was not as straightforward as, say, LLVM + clang. I think the issue is not with the language itself, however, but the developers who do not simplify the build process.
> You can say that about any languages that you yourself know, or other people know.
No, I'm saying that Rust was easier to hack on and contribute to (on my own) when I had never written any Rust before. Rust (and almost Go) is the only language I can confidently say this about. It's not even in my top 5 strongest languages now, but I still stand by this.
E.g. Look at the build instructions for Gimp and all its prerequisites: https://developer.gimp.org/core/setup/build/
Very normal C++ project, ~500 words of instructions. Once I started thinking about using a chroot to fix dependency issues after I'd already built bebl and gegl, I gave up, because I ran out of free time. It didn't matter how much C++ I knew.
Rust projects, comparatively, almost never demand that. It's almost always just `cargo build`, with some rare exceptions (e.g. The one exception I know of for which this is not true for is Graphite, which is a web app and also uses npm. )