Ralith
ralith.com
Ralith
@ralith.com
I think one unarticulated reason behind the success of those formats is that they force some ad-hoc forwards compatibility. There's other ways to do that, but you have to seek them out, and that's hard if you don't know you need it.
November 23, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Ralith
“Schemaless” and “self-describing” are the dynamic typing of data formats: you put more crap into the runtime representation, making it perform worse and in exchange you get worse reliability because errors are identified less reliably. Lose/lose
November 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Nix is definitely one of the least bad options today! I do think buck2's vastly more granular approach has more future (e.g. better reuse of intermediate products), but Nix mostly treats open source users as first class and that goes a long way.
November 23, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Why does it make sense in retrospect?
November 23, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Some big obvious wins are hermeticity, distributed builds, and polyglot capability. Rolling your own build for non-Rust parts of a project sucks.
November 23, 2025 at 4:58 PM
I'm convinced that distributed, polyglot, hermetic build systems are the future. I really want to like buck2, but right now the freestanding mode is missing critical pieces like github.com/facebook/buc... and closing those gaps isn't a priority, so I can't recommend it.
Preserve local cache across daemon restarts · Issue #976 · facebook/buck2
When operating in the default purely local mode, buck2 currently loses track of previously built targets whenever the daemon is restarted, forcing the world to be rebuilt. This is a major usability...
github.com
November 23, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Enclose the clippy output in a word bubble attached to a dolphin.
November 20, 2025 at 8:01 AM
Sounds a lot like Code-CAD, particularly the 2D subset. Interesting prior art: cadquery, build123d, kittycad, fornjot.
November 19, 2025 at 6:18 PM
How much faster is it?
November 18, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Ralith
sorry i just want to circle back to

> we’re wolves not sheep

one more time. i don’t think you know what either of those animals are like. for one thing, a sheep will kill another over an insult way more readily than a wolf will
November 17, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Ralith
The beautiful river LDFLAGS
November 15, 2025 at 12:14 AM
As someone who doesn't use rustup, I'm glad we're not baking it into error messages.
November 14, 2025 at 3:06 AM
Personally I can't stand stories where nothing that happens has any lasting impact, and that seems to be a common theme. I'm glad they work for others!
November 1, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Only one way to find out!
October 26, 2025 at 5:30 PM