(The author.) I had originally written a version of this in Python for my own use, and recently thought of rewriting it in Rust as a learning experience.
What I found is that writing a CLI in Rust is a absolute breeze, in part due to excellent documentation and the tooling, and also thanks to various well-maintained crates, such as StructOpt [1] to parse command line arguments of any complexity, or indicatif [2] to show animated progress.
Very cool! Tangentially related, I looked into reimplementing `codesign` in Rust while I was at Mozilla. We wanted to see if we could take Apple hardware out of the loop for our release process after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux. I got a bunch of code written and I'm pretty sure I could have made it work if I had gotten the go-ahead to spend time on it but then we heard about notarization and decided it wasn't worth the effort since Apple was going to require us to use their service anyway.
davidvartan 1485 days ago [-]
That sounds like a fun project! I do hope Apple shows more love to the command line tooling in general (even if Mac-only) as the workflow still seems somewhat optimized for clicking one-by-one in Xcode.
detaro 1481 days ago [-]
> after we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux
Do you happen to have a link with more details about how that's done?
We used the MacOSX SDK from Xcode, packaged up into our internal file store for build machines to use and passed a bunch of compiler options that clang sets by default when you're compiling on macOS:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369a...
Getting DMG creation working was a bit of a hassle but we managed to get it done with some dmg/hfsplus tools from the iPhone jailbreak scene.
saagarjha 1485 days ago [-]
> we had switched Mac Firefox builds to cross-compile from Linux
It was surprising that they didn't provide an all-in-one blocking command, leaving everyone to write their own version of the submit(); while(true) { poll(); }.
I will need to add support for .pkg to cover more use cases. (Right now the tool specifically checks the input to be an .app bundle and zips it up for submission.)
robin_reala 1485 days ago [-]
Strange that it’s written in Bash!
faho 1484 days ago [-]
This is necessary for building fish. If we wrote it in fish script, we'd run into the bootstrapping problem, where you'd need fish to build fish.
_bxg1 1485 days ago [-]
Very cool utility. Rust seems like an odd choice since there's little processing work to be done other than the zipping - which could be outsourced to the "zip" tool - but I guess a learning exercise is a learning exercise.
cjbassi 1485 days ago [-]
Rust is actually great for cli applications regardless of performance benefits because of its good ergonomics and package management once you get over the hump of learning it.
jfkebwjsbx 1485 days ago [-]
The comparison is against Python, which definitely has better ergonomics and includes everything needed for scripts like this (but does have package management too if the huge standard library is not enough).
nicoburns 1485 days ago [-]
I disagree that Python has better ergonomics than Rust for scripts like this. For example, IMO python doesn't have anything as nice as Rust's structopt library for argument parsing (https://github.com/TeXitoi/structopt). Python does have package management, but it's a pain to use compared to Rust or JavaScript (have to setup virtual envs, etc - not very ergonomic!).
You also mostly don't hit into the tricky ownership issues that can make Rust less ergonomic in CLI apps. Because the code flow is usually quite linear, so you don't have multiple bits of code trying to access the same variables at once.
Note: Although Rust has static types, it has very good type inference such that you don't often have to explicitly state the types. IMO this brings Rust pretty close to dynamic language ergonomics for simple things like this.
jfkebwjsbx 1485 days ago [-]
Python has argparse in the standard library which does everything you may need and more. You can even make Git-like interfaces with it.
For most CLI tools you do not even need third-party packages in Python to begin with. You cannot beat that. And if you do, you don't need virtualenvs, because your system package manager can do the job just fine for most cases, or you can use pip or you can locally deploy.
Python has no ownership issues to think about. You cannot beat that either.
Type inference is nowhere close to dynamic typing.
Then there are other things like no compile-edit cycle in Python. No binary distribution. No shenanigans like issues with missing libraries and dynamic linking.
So you may disagree, but your points are not valid. The actual advantage for going for a compiled low-level language is performance, so unless you need that, there is no point on using Rust or any other compiled language for the majority of the boilerplate code for small scripts and CLI tools.
filmgirlcw 1485 days ago [-]
I love this. Amazing work — thanks for making this process easier.
davidvartan 1485 days ago [-]
Thank you!
cmyr 1485 days ago [-]
Neat! I was just about to need something like this, for building native app bundles for druid[1]. I'll open an issue, but do you have any interest in exposing this as a library?
Very cool work! I just manually implemented this in a python script.
Does it support other platforms? Will it run on Linux?
davidvartan 1485 days ago [-]
The notarization service is opaque (uses Xcode's "xcrun altool" to submit/read status, instead of something like a REST API...) so unfortunately Mac-only at the moment.
baszalmstra 1485 days ago [-]
That's too bad, I would've loved to do this from a docker container.
saagarjha 1485 days ago [-]
Aside: GitHub seems to dislike your animated SVG for some reason, since it won't play unless I open it manually. I think sanitize=true does that; try hosting it somewhere else?
davidvartan 1485 days ago [-]
Thanks for the heads up! May I ask what browser you are using? If there are compatibility issues I may just re-render these as GIFs.
Sephr 1485 days ago [-]
How did you generate this animated SVG terminal screen capture?
davidvartan 1485 days ago [-]
asciinema to generate a raw json file, then svg-term to convert it to svg
(I ended up moving the SVG assets to GitHub Pages which hopefully fixes the issue others were seeing.)
floatingatoll 1485 days ago [-]
The SVG works fine in jsfiddle, which eventually led me to find https://stackoverflow.com/a/53717429 talking about 'animation' (which your SVG seems to mention, and I don't see a dur= property which GitHub does seem to support.)
saagarjha 1485 days ago [-]
It also works fine if I try to view it by itself.
saagarjha 1485 days ago [-]
Safari. I know that animated SVGs do work on GitHub in the browser; I just don't know why this one doesn't.
1485 days ago [-]
Rendered at 10:32:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
What I found is that writing a CLI in Rust is a absolute breeze, in part due to excellent documentation and the tooling, and also thanks to various well-maintained crates, such as StructOpt [1] to parse command line arguments of any complexity, or indicatif [2] to show animated progress.
[1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754...
[2] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary/blob/11649e49892d81754...
Do you happen to have a link with more details about how that's done?
We used the MacOSX SDK from Xcode, packaged up into our internal file store for build machines to use and passed a bunch of compiler options that clang sets by default when you're compiling on macOS: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/72e3388f74458d369a...
Getting DMG creation working was a bit of a hassle but we managed to get it done with some dmg/hfsplus tools from the iPhone jailbreak scene.
Did you link against TBD files?
fish shell's notarization script: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/build_t...
I will need to add support for .pkg to cover more use cases. (Right now the tool specifically checks the input to be an .app bundle and zips it up for submission.)
You also mostly don't hit into the tricky ownership issues that can make Rust less ergonomic in CLI apps. Because the code flow is usually quite linear, so you don't have multiple bits of code trying to access the same variables at once.
Note: Although Rust has static types, it has very good type inference such that you don't often have to explicitly state the types. IMO this brings Rust pretty close to dynamic language ergonomics for simple things like this.
For most CLI tools you do not even need third-party packages in Python to begin with. You cannot beat that. And if you do, you don't need virtualenvs, because your system package manager can do the job just fine for most cases, or you can use pip or you can locally deploy.
Python has no ownership issues to think about. You cannot beat that either.
Type inference is nowhere close to dynamic typing.
Then there are other things like no compile-edit cycle in Python. No binary distribution. No shenanigans like issues with missing libraries and dynamic linking.
So you may disagree, but your points are not valid. The actual advantage for going for a compiled low-level language is performance, so unless you need that, there is no point on using Rust or any other compiled language for the majority of the boilerplate code for small scripts and CLI tools.
[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/druid
Does it support other platforms? Will it run on Linux?
https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema
https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli
(I ended up moving the SVG assets to GitHub Pages which hopefully fixes the issue others were seeing.)