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Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#21

Post by monocasa »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9
zaphar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason disheartened veterans gravitate toward a project like Rust. We've seen a lot in our career and much of what we do when it comes to our own tools is automate the detection and elimination of causes of bugs where we can. It is possible to recognize that "all code is garbage" and "it is a miracle anything works" while also still pushing our industry forward and improving lives for software engineers. A…

The LISP comparison doesn’t ring true to me or even the ‘ergonomic ML’. There is nothing ergonomic about Rust at all compared to managed languages, but if you are willing to fight with the borrow checker you can get managed language safety with C speed. (I wonder though if we’d be better off with a closely integrated assembler and theorem prover if portability was not so important.)

You don't really end up fighting the borrow checker after a while. At that point it approaches the ergonomics of managed languages, and particularly it's ML roots really shine.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#22

Post by dec0dedab0de »

There is a loud group of developers that want to get rid of C, because of it's lack of memory safety, and all the security issues that come with that. Also, there is still love for Mozilla, despite some of their annoying behavior lately.

I don't think Rust is being promoted more than any other language people feel passionate about, but these things tend to go in clusters, so it may seem that way. I think if something specific to a language makes it to the front page, the discussion leads people into looking up things about that language, which then makes them discover, or remember something they think is worth sharing and repeat. The last few weeks I've noticed more Ruby than usual, I see clusters of Python and Go very often, and every year or so there are a few lisp stories in a row. Sometimes this also coincides with conferences.

You don't generally see stuff advocating for bigger languages because they don't need advocates. Instead you might see particular libraries or techniques. I suspect the hype around Rust specifically is people that really like rust hoping that it catches on before it dies out like so many other technologies.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#23

Post by leetrout »

sgt wrote: post #4

Sometimes it feels that I'm being left behind since I don't use Rust yet. Better get crackin'

I know you are likely saying this in jest but I made this comment a couple years ago:

> Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting. [0]

That being said I do have a goal of learning more Rust in 2022 :) I don't care for all the macro usage so I want to learn more about it so it feels less magical to me.

0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23448835

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#24

Post by skywal_l »

_8j50 wrote: post #12

I haven't seen much pumping for Rust. It is a great language but I see Go and even Ada and Ocaml are mentioned a lot (relative to actual adaption) here. There are lots more esoteric languages getting hyped on HN. There was even a popular post about .NET the other day.

But .NET is still way more popular (by popular I mean used) than Ocaml, Haskell or even Rust no? (I could be completely wrong, just my impression).

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#25

Post by rendall »

You're not wrong.

HN Rust articles: 4 in the last 24 hours (not including this one)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

HN Go articles: 0 in the last 24 hours https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

JavaScript: 5 in the last 24 hours - a much more popular language but none of these got to the front page

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Counting comments per article the difference is even more dramatic

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#27

Post by chousuke »

iExploder wrote: post #6

inexperienced novices and disheartened veterans alike get infatuated with that new shiny thing ... the rest of just smirk at the pump articles, as we have achieved state of Zen and realize _all_code_is_garbage_ and that nobody, other than minuscule amount of people who ever had a git write access in their life, actually care or will ever care about code let alone a programing language the app was written in

What's wonderful about rust is that by making ownership explicit and enforced, it enables less experienced people to learn those concepts and confidently use new approaches to write performant software without having to shoot off their own foot learning C or other languages where understanding ownership is necessary but not enforced.

More experienced people will generally be happy to offload ownership tracking to the compiler and save some of their brainpower for other things.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#28

Post by JonChesterfield »

nivenkos wrote: post #26

It's pretty good and practical. The only real downsides are in the library availability and deployment vs. more established languages. I'd choose to use it if I could though, it has the least downsides of any language IMO.

Wasn't Amazon buying ownership of it recently? Seems a substantial disadvantage if that comes to pass

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#29

Post by JonChesterfield »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9
zaphar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason disheartened veterans gravitate toward a project like Rust. We've seen a lot in our career and much of what we do when it comes to our own tools is automate the detection and elimination of causes of bugs where we can. It is possible to recognize that "all code is garbage" and "it is a miracle anything works" while also still pushing our industry forward and improving lives for software engineers. A…

The LISP comparison doesn’t ring true to me or even the ‘ergonomic ML’. There is nothing ergonomic about Rust at all compared to managed languages, but if you are willing to fight with the borrow checker you can get managed language safety with C speed. (I wonder though if we’d be better off with a closely integrated assembler and theorem prover if portability was not so important.)

Rust has AST level macros, i.e. the real ones that lisp is fond of, albeit with more awkward syntax.

Re: Ask HN: What's the Deal with HN and Rust?

#30

Post by otikik »

I do think the language offers some genuine advantages and strikes a difficult balance between features, practicality and speed.

I think it has some problems as well (the learning curve is still steep, and I don't know if that's solvable).

However I think the reason Rust gets attention here is because it is heavily used in crypto, which is regularly pumped in HN as well as in other places.

(ducks)

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