Honestly, pretty effective, I used to balance the mattresses on my head when working in a dorm. Many societies used this approach to move things, and with three of them the have the definition of a geometric plane.

They could then potentially end up spending more time testing every possible combination of input then they would spending compiling with a strongly typed language that prevents the invalid syntax from compiling to begin with…

Honestly, this is maybe the most telling about where OP is coming from… If not straight up flame baiting; that or they mistook /r/rustcirclejerk as a serious subreddit

The constraint on memory isn’t on the compiler it is in the available ram and flash on ultra-lowcost/power microcontrollers, use can find some with less than 1KByte of ram, so that 32bit int could have been 4 8bit ints in your electric toothbrush. The packing of bits is space effecient, but not compute effecient and takes several extra clock cycles to finish when run on an 8bit microcontroller. It’s better to store it in the native 8bit word size for these devices. Further more, on more powerful systems using the smaller size can allow you to optimize for SIMD instructions and actually do multiple operations per clock beyond what you could do with the 32bit size.

There are reasons for these types to exist; as was mentioned elsewhere, if you don’t care you can always just use i32 or i64 for your code and be done with it.

Soooo, an int in most architectures is actually signed, usually a 2’s compliment signed 32 bit value; but the spec does not require it to be 32bits, some platforms might use an 8 bit or 16bit value instead (think older 8bit microcontrollers). That’s why they have ‘int32_t’, ‘uint32_t’, etc for C/C++, it just sounds like you haven’t used these number types (check stdint.h). Rust just requires you to use the more explicit number format by default (which I personally prefer because I have had to jump between embedded and Linux development).

The multiple string types are annoying at first, but its probably better to realize that they are more like two types (String and str) with the apperstand (&) ones being references (think pointer in C/C++). A String is like a C++ std::string and a str is more like a C-String (fixed sized array ish of chars).

Enter embedded programming, believe it or not there is a ton of low level C code being written; also, try adding a new protocol for networking, there are many cases where bitstructure matters, I recently wrote a small bit of code for a project that used bit packing so that we could fit inside of a single Ethernet frame so that we didn’t have to deal with fragmentation and the networking overhead it caused.

For context, what is your past programming background and what are you trying to do? While rust is a great language, it may not be the right tool for what you’re trying to do if these are things that you view as unnecessary

A reason to not distribute a library as a binary is for cross platform support, this allows a library to technically be compiled and used in some other platform; with that said, there are assumptions about having the same system calls (or that the library only handles abstract things that don’t hook into a specific architecture), with that said, making cargo smarter and adding in the option to bundle some prebuilt libraries to be pulled for compatible platforms could speed some compile time (at the likely cost of build size, etc).

Distributing a library as source isn’t some weird rust paradigm, take BOOST for example, which is a large library for C++, and is usually distributed as source (but Linux distros may bundle prebuilt binaries; it is generally intended that you will compile it and use it as a shared library), actually a lot of compiled languages distribute their libraries as source, it also allows you to read their source if you need to see exactly how they’re doing something). I don’t believe there is anything preventing someone from using shared libraries in rust, although they do seem to be less common. Another reason to distribute a library as source is for licensing.

The unstable versioning… Ya, that is definitely annoying, and likely tied to the limited resources available for sustainment for various projects. With that said, compared to C/C++ many of these libraries are something that one might role their own or use in house libraries. Now for Tokio… You don’t have to use it for async, although you probably will want to (see: https://blog.poespas.me/posts/2024/05/24/rust-async-std-and-tokio-comparison/), I do wish there was a nice way to depend on a library and substitute some of its dependencies (aka Tokio); with that said, part of the cargo idea is that you don’t view these libraries as part of your source code for review (although, auditors would likely disagree, so acrediting with the inclusion of many in accredited libraries would probably not be fun)

This is so true, heck I’ve even ‘baked’ some custom PCB boards in the oven to do some cheap reflow… Every man belongs in the kitchen, that’s where all the big boy tools are

I have no idea how it works, but I always found tractor beams to be fascinating. I wonder just how far it can be scaled up to?

Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…

That and a rotating menu likely adds overhead costs as it prevents you from specializing (skills, equipment, and ingredients acquisition)

this annoys me so much, they’d probably be better of selling them as DIY sandwich kits, because they never look anything like the ads. I’ve mostly skipped fast food and now go to the nicer combined gas station/reststops with their own food that is better made.

Honestly executives and board members who receive performance bonuses and golden parachutes should carry extra liability, such that these perks can be denied or even clawed back (and used to help the damages) when their decisions have these sort of outcomes. Nothing wrong with making more when things go well, but if you’re going to take a larger piece of the pie, then you need to be prepared to take a smaller piece when things go wrong (aka, cut executive pay before layoffs, etc.).

🥺

what software are you using and how is the class structured? It sounds like this might be a rotating group of students all using the same ipads? Does the school have access to some sort of storage medium that requires unique (per student) login credentials that the students could save their files to?