Rusty Russell

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Rusty Russell
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Lead Core Lightning, Standards Wrangler, Bitcoin Script Restoration ponderer, coder. Full time employed on Free and Open Source Software since 1998. Joyous hacking with others for over 25 years.
Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library ("crate") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to. Of course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as "writeable", "create if didn't exist". It didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response: --- Re: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better. We should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE. --- Of course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!!
Damn, right before I closed my laptop for the afternoon I had uncovered a weird bug, which git bisect says is triggered by a trivial commit. But I really should record myself tracking it down, for my Intro to CLN Development series, so I am having to resist the urge to look at it tonight...
In preparation for onboarding new core lighting developers are preparing a series of videos. So I've been asking ChatGPT about CLN developer features, particularly with comparison with other projects people might be familiar with. Of course, I compare myself with Linux, but it's interesting to see comparisons against other projects: **Type-safety**: OpenBSD High Bitcoin Core High Core Lightning Very high for C Nginx Low curl Moderate MySQL Moderate SQLite Moderate CLN sits near the top among major C codebases for safety discipline. **PR Submission** Core Lightning’s PR flow is unusually strict, slow-moving, and review-heavy compared to most open-source C projects β€” closer to Bitcoin Core or OpenBSD than to typical GitHub projects. --- Compared to β€œaverage OSS” Most projects: Feature-oriented PRs Informal review Few required reviewers Patch squashing common Tests sometimes optional Architectural discussion often post-merge CLN: Patch-first culture Pre-merge architectural scrutiny Extremely high reviewer expectations Tests are mandatory Clean, narrative commit history matters