A Gopher Meets a Crab
39 points
2 days ago
| 5 comments
| miren.dev
| HN
joshka
2 hours ago
[-]
The weird-looking Rust isn’t really Rust being weird, it’s the type telling the truth.

   Result<Option<Result<Message, WsError>>, Elapsed>
That’s three independent “not the happy path” channels: timeout, stream closed, and websocket error.

The nicer version is not a cleverer match. It’s choosing a domain error shape and converting into it one layer at a time:

    let timed = tokio::time::timeout(duration, receiver.next()).await;
    let next = timed.map_err(|_| ReceiveError::Timeout)?;
    let item = next.ok_or(ReceiveError::Closed)?;
    let msg = item.map_err(ReceiveError::WebSocket)?; 
The ugly line is what happens when you have not decided where to normalize the shape yet.
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loeg
2 hours ago
[-]

  Result<(), ()>
Is pretty weird, though, no? Why would you want a unit value / error type?
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2ndorderthought
12 minutes ago
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It's not like people regularly decide this is a good return type. Just because Claude isn't good at designing code or what have you doesn't mean rust is bad/weird.

Sure this is something someone can do but it's suggesting the caller doesn't care about why it failed and doesn't need anything from it's success. It's a choice but it's not a typical one. Maybe the fact that it looks weird and there is no comment is a clue that this isn't high quality code.

People really should be more skeptical of LLM coding. Claude is not as amazing as marketing makes it sound. It is amazing in that it can write code and follow specs sometimes, but a lot of quality gets lost along the way without close supervision by someone who knows better

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MrJohz
1 hour ago
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It's basically doing the same thing that, say, `return true` might do to indicate a function succeeded, but with more explicit types. However, because it uses `Result`, it can be used with the `try`/question mark operator which can be convenient in some situations.

That said, a couple of the examples here feel a bit strange - they're clever things you can do, but they're not necessarily things you often have to do, particularly for a relatively simple task like this. I think the problem with the author's approach is that they can't distinguish between "weird because Rust is weird" and "weird because the LLM generated bad code", because they (understandably) don't have enough experience in what good Rust code looks like.

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tux3
1 hour ago
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Sometimes you just want a fancy boolean. The advantage is that Result has all the Result APIs and you can compose it with other Results, but otherwise this is just a success bool.
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stingraycharles
1 hour ago
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It’s the equivalent of Haskell’s Either, with Option being the equivalent of Maybe. They’re fairly well-defined idioms.
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loeg
1 hour ago
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I know what Result<> is.
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wiseowise
17 minutes ago
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Still better than deciphering C++ soup of characters.
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saagarjha
1 hour ago
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I feel like having an LLM write code in a language you aren't familiar with and then inspecting the results is kind of like hiring someone to speak Spanish for you and then being confused at the weird words they are using. Like, what would make you want to do this?
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victorbjorklund
9 minutes ago
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If you already speak French or another Romance language it isn’t a bad idea to just have a conversation in Spanish directly and then ask for clarifications anytime you don’t understand.
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cpursley
24 minutes ago
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I’ve learned a ton of new things this way, even in a stack that I know really well. Ditto on all sorts of new little command line tricks that I was unaware of before.
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RobotToaster
2 hours ago
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Was anyone else expecting OpenClaw over gopher protocol?
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SyneRyder
4 minutes ago
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Yep, I did. While I don't use OpenClaw, I built a small MCP tool for my AI to use Gopher in a minimal harness, and it's been useful. Gopher is almost an ideal protocol for AI, none of the token verbosity of HTML. But I admit in my case, it's mostly being used to access weather data on Floodgap's Groundhog, because the format published on Gopher is much easier to parse & access than the paywalled government APIs in Australia. Claude occasionally uses Veronica to do a search instead of a web search as well.
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coqadoodle
1 hour ago
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I was looking forward to retro deep-dive back into the 90s. I just couldn't figure out where the crab fit in.
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nothinkjustai
1 hour ago
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Um? Person vibe codes Rust. Output is stupid. The conclusion is either

a) Vibe coding produces bad code

b) Rust is weird

Somehow we’re supposed to accept b as the answer? Give me a break….

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2ndorderthought
4 minutes ago
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People really are forgetting how to think. While reading this blog post I almost immediately flipped into teaching confused freshmen taking the course that wasn't their major mode.
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