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Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#41

Post by atoav »

valianteffort wrote: post #39
aerxes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn’t the point nor even an offhand comment in their post. C++ is fine and has a lot of libraries built up — especially around image processing. It will be quite some time before Rust replaces C++. But if I had time to learn only one sugary C, it’d be Rust.

> Avoid C++ Seems offhand

As someone who programs both C++ and Rust I'd say what apeaks for C++ is all the things that have been created for it during the long life of the language.

But Rust is catching up in that space and has a lot going for it in terms of ergonomics and safety. The fact that you often have the "if it compiles it works" experience (provided you leverage the type system) is such a good thing. It is just a nice language for certain things.

Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#42

Post by habitue »

Scarlxd wrote: post #33
habitue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda disagree, I learned assembly after I learned C and I felt like I still appreciated it

can you please share how you actually learned assembly and the resources you've used for it?

It was in college, had a couple of courses that involves writing some things in assembly. There's not a lot to assembly, but when you write it you realize how function calls involve a bunch of arbitrary choices, and the stack is part of the c runtime, etc. I definitely wouldn't call myself an expert, but the experience was illuminating coming from the world of higher level languages.

Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #21
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent metric for community maturity though. That absolutely should be a factor in deciding on a language. I'm having a real hard time seeing this unfold among the greybeards that call the shots in Java or C++.

Granted, the reason for that could be that through the years the greybeards that call the shots have weeded out (whether unintentionally or intentionally) any voices that are incompatible with their way of doing things. I agree that it does indicate the maturity of the community, but that could be because the community's values become more homogenous.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#44

Post by cmrdporcupine »

trevyn wrote: post #34
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #24

To me, it looks like Rust is suffering from "cool kids syndrome." It's hip right now, and all the cool kids are piling in, or some of the people who have been using it for a while are hoping to cash in social capital. I don't understand this way of using technology or being in this profession; self promotion and dialogue through twitter, blog posting all over the place, conferences, panels, books, speaking tours, ego…

For some, programming is a lifestyle, and a culture, and has nothing to do with getting paid. In my experience, these people and their projects tend to be more interesting.

I program for fun and have since I was 8 years old on a VIC-20. I look forward to retiring so I can work on all the software projects I love without the distraction of work.

But I don't do twitter, or the conference circuit, or blog. And I learned long ago to stay away from committee & project politics.

Programming being a lifestyle means programming, not self-marketing or getting into turf wars.

Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#45

Post by Olreich »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #28
Georgelemental wrote: post #13

Technically, the language is excellent. Organizationally, major corporations have invested a lot of resources into it, they won't allow it to fail. Community-wise, there are lots of friendly and supportive people in the quieter corners (this is true most everywhere, I think). That being said, my recommendation for learning systems programming would be to consider trying plain old C first. Rust's safety features are a…

> Rust's safety features are a godsend, but IMO easier to understand once you have experienced working without them. Passing around a pointer becomes passing around a borrow or a Mutex or Arc >. Not sure how you'd summarize Rc or Box

Rc is a chunk of memory you can only access through special versions of malloc and free. These don’t actually allocate new memory with the OS though, they just give you pointers to the memory and tell the memory management system that you’re done using it. Once everyone who has allocated that memory calls free, then the memory is actually given back to the OS. Box is the same, except if you have multiple people try to call the special malloc it will fail to compile.

Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?

#47

Post by valianteffort »

atoav wrote: post #41
valianteffort wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Avoid C++ Seems offhand

As someone who programs both C++ and Rust I'd say what apeaks for C++ is all the things that have been created for it during the long life of the language. But Rust is catching up in that space and has a lot going for it in terms of ergonomics and safety. The fact that you often have the "if it compiles it works" experience (provided you leverage the type system) is such a good thing. It is just a nice language for c…

My own reluctance to invest in rust is the body which governs it making strange decisions like the copyright thing from some months back.
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