this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025

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People are complaining about rustfmt, but it is effectively unmaintained (feddit.dk)

submitted 2 months ago by SorteKanin@feddit.dk to c/rust@programming.dev

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There was recently this article about Linus Torvalds' issues with rustfmt, which prompted others to voice their agreement with his sentiment online.

Yesterday someone pointed out how rustfmt is effectively unmaintained with basically no activity on the repository for months.

The contributors graph shows a similar story - there is essentially no development happening on rustfmt, it seems.

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[+] dinckelman@programming.dev 29 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 29 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If a project is functional and mostly complete, is it an issue?

I get the sentiment, but if you have 200+ open PRs by dozens of authors, the community obviously doesn't agree that is compete.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A lot of what Linus complained about is 100% valid though

Not necessarily. The program can be configured and they did not create a default configuration for all, to enforce a specific style. Linus can complain about the default settings, but that does not make sense if we look at all other tooling used in Linux. Are they using every application with default settings and then complain about it?

No, there are settings adapted for the Kernel and their workflow. And they did not do that with rustfmt. While the critique about the issue itself is valid, its not valid to complain about it about the program. He should have complained about those responsible for the default configuration in Linux.

[–] brian@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I do think they should have taken an approach similar to prettier and gofmt. very minimal settings and opinionated so all js/go codebases are effectively the same formatting

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They do. Linus just doesn't like the default settings.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Neither do I, but I don't like the KDE formatting either, so it doesn't really matter as much.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is this a typo? What do you mean by KDE formatting?

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean the clang-format in KDE code.
I work with it, I don't like it, but I like KDE, so I put up with the formatting that I don't like.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ahh, I see. Well okay, you don't have to like it. But that is not the problem of the default configuration, but the problem of those who accept it as the formatting in the project. You don't like what the KDE code formatting project does, and that's the issue. Working in teams it will obviously happen at some point that you don't like what the team accepted as formatting. This is not a specific issue with KDE or rustfmt.

BTW, wouldn't it work to have your personal rustfmt configuration that you like and work with and when you are done and want to git push, it would automatically reformat with rustfmt using the teams formatting? I personally don't work in teams, so no idea if this is a viable option to do if you really dislike what they use.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

I considered that (talking about clang-format here, not rustfmt), but there are cases where some files are formatted while others are not, such that, you can't go around formatting the whole project to your liking and then expect it to return to the same, once you go back to the project's configuration, for committing.

Here, the difference between clang-format and rustfmt comes up, because unlike clang-format, which has the required configurations, rustfmt does not have the configuration I require. The little part that is there, has not been fully implemented and a lot of the configuration hasn't even been defined.
Meaning that even if I were to put the time into contributing to rustfmt, I will soon reach a point where I will have to be setting up groundwork. That's where I will fail, because I am too new to Rust to be able to define formatting for undecided conditions, many of which I don't even know about yet.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If a project is functional and mostly complete, is it an issue?

How can a language formatter be considered complete is the language it is targeting keeps getting updates?

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 months ago

Depends on whether those changes break the formatting.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

TBH for personal projects it's almost perfect already. It produces consistent readable code. But yeah it's often not very "mergeable", which is much more important for massive projects with thousands of active committers.

[–] tuxmain@toot.aquilenet.fr 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@balsoft @SorteKanin Even if it has been almost perfect in production for years, it must be adapted to follow Rust's new features, there are still some experimental settings, and some features are not completely functional, notably formatting code in macros.

[–] StrikeForceZero@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

What I would give to have my attribute macros and their meta/params be formatted when they get unruly 😔

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

https://doc.rust-lang.org/style-guide/index.html#small-items

We leave it to individual tools to decide on exactly what small means. In particular, tools are free to use different definitions in different circumstances.

What does this mean?

What does Linus when he says rustfmtcheck? cargo fmt check? A util I can't find with a simple search? Maybe they have makefile targets or sth for it?

The concerns raised by Linus make sense to me, but should be simple to solve. The small items description already mentions variance, and the need for tools to decide. So shouldn't it be a simple configuration change?

[–] Tempy@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

I think it's a script they added to do some sort of check with rustfmt.

[–] lens0021@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

I believe all you already read the reply from the devtools team lead https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/6678#issuecomment-3382819708