if let makes a lot more sense when you learn that a normal let expression also takes a pattern[1].

  let Coordinates(x, y) = get_coords();

But this is intended for "exhaustive patterns". If you can't express an exhaustive pattern, like with an Option, then you can use let ... else

  let Some((x, y)) = get_coords() else { return };

if let is just an extension of this "let pattern" system.

Once you internalize how patterns work (and they really work everywhere) it all starts to really make sense and feels a lot cleaner.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/patterns.html

No? Not everyone's dream is being a manager. I like writing code, it's fun! Telling someone else to go write code for me so that I can read it later? Not fun, avoid it if possible (sometimes it's unavoidable, we don't have unlimited time).

I meant what we want from an economical perspective, scalability wise. I agree writing code is fun and even disabled AI autocomplete because of it... But I fear it may end up being how we like making our own bread

People still play chess, even though now AI is far superior to any human. In the future you will still be able to hand-write code for fun, but you might not be able to earn a living by doing it.

Same with sewing/knitting by hand.

It's useful for combinators, like flatMap. For instance if you want to flatten an iterator of optional values into the values of all some elements.

Is it worth using a custom library so you can do

.flatMap(Maybe::stream)

instead of

.filter(Optional::isPresent).map(Optional::get)

Except mirages are real optical phenomena that can be captured by a camera. Hallucinations are made entirely by your brain and cannot be captured by an external observer.

You can also just allocate unmanaged memory directly via `Marshal.AllocHGlobal`. Basically the .NET version of `malloc()`

Those generally aren't in the living room

I'm not sure if it's actually any easier to read. When lots of things are changing it honestly becomes harder to read and figure out what's important and what's superfluous.

With the old progress system, everything was on one line. This honestly isn't horrible to me since I can easily glance text from left to right to figure out what the gist of the text is. When it's changing between the same two steps it still isn't too much of an issue since the information is all still in the same place and it's not actually changing too much between each stage. I can identify each step, figure out what's changing between them, and look for that information specifically.

The new progress system dumps a lot more information at the user, most of it detailing what file is being analyzed and compiled, each one taking maybe 2-4 frames of screen time, on an excessive number of lines, just a complete barrage of pointless information. None of this is really important to me since the only time it would be important is if a file or step took more than 3 seconds to be processed. With items constantly appearing and disappearing, the things that are taking time on the more macro scale like build-lib and build-exe steps that are more important to me will constantly move around the terminal. It's much much harder to read something if it's jumping up and down randomly every 2 frames vs if it's being swapped to share a single line. If the line literally leaves my field of view, it becomes frustrating to follow.

I much prefer the Bazel approach to this problem. When running a series of actions concurrently, the 6 actions taking the most amount of time will be visible in the action list showing how long they're taking, but all other actions will be minimized to a "and X other actions..." line.

This looks cool on the surface, but in practice is not that good at giving you progress information. Which is what progress indicators should do! At best this is a better indicator of how much work is being done, not how much progress is being made. Like a bunch of bleeps, bloops, and random LEDs toggling when a computer does work in a sci-fi TV show.

I think this would be better if individual files being processed got removed unless they start taking too long. Keep the build-exe and build-lib steps around but make them a little sticky. When they complete, have it say "Done" and then remove things in groups or on a set interval. Don't change the number of lines too often and don't reorganize lines either. Generally, it should be easy to parse what's going on and frequent changes to the number of lines and how much information is on each makes that hard.

This is really good feedback! I'm looking at redesigning Cargo's output (after I wrap up other projects).

Less is more; worse is better. I don't remember where I originally saw it, but some rules of thumb that seem to serve well are:

- information shown to the user should be able to be consumed; if it's too fast to read and not displayed in perpetuity (e.g. logged once complete) it's essentially just unnecessary movement akin to a really noisy "spinner"

- no new "movement" (e.g. spinnner/progress esque) within ~200ms will result in the user thinking something is hung

- every permanent line away from input command prompt is sacred; e.g. too much movement vertically (e.g. spamming logs) should be reserved for "verbose" output where the user explicitly asks for it. The effort by the user to scroll the buffer afterwards should be worth it.

The new zig progress IMO breaks a these rules and I'm not a huge fan of it except out of novelty in design.

Cargo's current output essentially only breaks the vertical scrolling rule; if I were BDFL I'd probably just use a single line indicatif spinner ephemerally instead of displaying all "downloading" and "compiling" lines unless someone asked for a "verbose" output and wanted to actually see those lines logged. It could be argued that using a tree of indicatif spinners for long running parallel tasks might be interesting? But determining what is "long running" would be extremely difficult to know ahead of time, and accidentally making an 8-frame spinner would just appear like useless noise. Add to that the max parallelization with Rust, especially in debug builds can be quite high which would end up looking much like the this zig output where 99% of the lines only last for a few frames.

The vertical scrolling has the advantage that when you are watching a build go, and you see a certain step's taking a long time, it doesn't ever disappear from the terminal completely. You don't need to look through dependencies some other way and figure out which matches the thing you saw, or do a clean build to see the bottleneck again, etc.

I always thought it was pronounced "ef'in". Like when you have to censor yourself in front of coworkers because of this ef'in code.