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Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#31

Post by losvedir »

malermeister wrote: post #29
blueslurpee wrote: post #28

Nice thread. The comment about "full steam ahead with Rust" was nice. Like you I've been on a basically identical search, but instead of coming up from Rust I've come down from dynamically typed languages on the backend. I just couldn't bear another run-time error that would have been easily prevented with Typescript. I've come to the conclusion that the palette of ergonomic and statically typed languages for the bac…

You should check out Kotlin if you like Swift (but think it's not general purpose enough) and the JVM!

Huh, Kotlin had almost completely slipped my radar but seems interesting from a quick glance now. I had always pigeonholed it as an "Android" language. Does it have general use?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#32

Post by worldmerge »

losvedir wrote: post #31
malermeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out Kotlin if you like Swift (but think it's not general purpose enough) and the JVM!

Huh, Kotlin had almost completely slipped my radar but seems interesting from a quick glance now. I had always pigeonholed it as an "Android" language. Does it have general use?

I’d also be interested in peoples replies. I know there is a creative coding framework built on it (haven’t used it though) https://openrndr.org/ .

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#33

Post by kitsunesoba »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #27
kitsunesoba wrote: post #10

I’m not sure that any language meets these criteria yet, but I’m placing my bets on Swift. There’s been a lot of activity in Swift’s various cross-platform working groups recently… whether or not that pans out remains to be seen, but within the community there’s absolutely a desire/will for Swift’s cross platform story to improve. Personally speaking, if Swift’s Windows/Linux support improved and a cross platform UI…

Sadly I think swift has missed the boat. Rust has eclipsed it in terms of cross platform and widely use crates. Swift was never big into the cross platform scene and now I think it's missed the boat. Furthermore swift's lack of macros means you're at apple's behest to have important changes to the language made. Rust didn't come up with serde, arguably one of Rust's "killer apps"; it's a third party package that the…

The biggest issue with Rust is its lack of mature UI frameworks. While several are being developed, they all have major shortcomings of one type or another, and if you want a more traditional "boring" retain-mode cross platform framework your options are even more limited.

And as alluded to in my post, Rust isn't particularly pleasant to use for a UI use case anyway.

Of course there is no cross-platform UI framework for Swift either, but if such a thing were to come into existence I think it'd quickly come to enjoy decent popularity for desktop application development.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#34

Post by rOOb85 »

losvedir wrote: post #31
malermeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out Kotlin if you like Swift (but think it's not general purpose enough) and the JVM!

Huh, Kotlin had almost completely slipped my radar but seems interesting from a quick glance now. I had always pigeonholed it as an "Android" language. Does it have general use?

Keep in mind kotlin is 100% compatible with java/jvm, so anything Java can do it runs on, kotlin does as well. Kotlin did get it's momentum from Android, but it's matured quite a bit. IMO it's a excellent language.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#35

Post by malermeister »

losvedir wrote: post #31
malermeister wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out Kotlin if you like Swift (but think it's not general purpose enough) and the JVM!

Huh, Kotlin had almost completely slipped my radar but seems interesting from a quick glance now. I had always pigeonholed it as an "Android" language. Does it have general use?

It runs anywhere the JVM does.

It has a pretty big ecosystem for all sorts of stuff, but on top of that it has native Java interop, giving you access to a huge selection of libraries.

There's also Kotlin Native, which compiles to native code using LLVM and ways to compile it to JS.

Basically, it runs pretty much anywhere.

According to dev surveys, usage is pretty evenly split between mobile and backend, but you could even do desktop or web apps with it if you wanted.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#36

Post by jonfw »

rowanG077 wrote: post #4
jonfw wrote: post #2

Golang is continuing to grow to serve this use case. Just like explicitly handling errors though- you'd be expected to explicitly handle null values if you want to be safe from them

In many ways Golang is much lower level then Rust. So I wouldn't say it handles this case.

I'm not very familiar with rust, would you be able to share an example?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#38

Post by schwartzworld »

blueslurpee wrote: post #28

Nice thread. The comment about "full steam ahead with Rust" was nice. Like you I've been on a basically identical search, but instead of coming up from Rust I've come down from dynamically typed languages on the backend. I just couldn't bear another run-time error that would have been easily prevented with Typescript. I've come to the conclusion that the palette of ergonomic and statically typed languages for the bac…

> The runtime differences between the Browser/Node cause all sorts of problems.

Fixing this is pretty much the major pitch of Deno.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best “higher level Rust” these days?

#40

Post by adamwk »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #27
kitsunesoba wrote: post #10

I’m not sure that any language meets these criteria yet, but I’m placing my bets on Swift. There’s been a lot of activity in Swift’s various cross-platform working groups recently… whether or not that pans out remains to be seen, but within the community there’s absolutely a desire/will for Swift’s cross platform story to improve. Personally speaking, if Swift’s Windows/Linux support improved and a cross platform UI…

Sadly I think swift has missed the boat. Rust has eclipsed it in terms of cross platform and widely use crates. Swift was never big into the cross platform scene and now I think it's missed the boat. Furthermore swift's lack of macros means you're at apple's behest to have important changes to the language made. Rust didn't come up with serde, arguably one of Rust's "killer apps"; it's a third party package that the…

I’m with the GP that there’s still a chance for Swift on other platforms. The server-side workgroup seems to be stabling SwiftNIO; so it’s at least being worked on.

I don’t really agree that macros make or break a language though. And swift’s codable generation was a community driven proposal; like all language evolutions have been

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