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Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#71

Post by blub »

mrfusion wrote: post #39
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.

Because the real world doesn't really match the expectations and statements of the HN community. It's really rare that I see here anything pragmatic regarding what programming languages to learn/use.

The community lives in a bubble and is out of touch with mainstream software development.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#72

Post by AlchemistCamp »

vegai_ wrote: post #47
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of a commercial success built off the back of Racket or J but happily went through a book on Racket and would love to do the same for J.

And yet almost nobody uses Racket and J. I think they were talking about more wide-spread use.

Many schools around the world use Racket.

The financial industry makes heavy use of K, which is closely related to J. It's not open source or free to use for commercial use, however.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#73

Post by mratsim »

blub wrote: post #71
mrfusion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.

Because the real world doesn't really match the expectations and statements of the HN community. It's really rare that I see here anything pragmatic regarding what programming languages to learn/use. The community lives in a bubble and is out of touch with mainstream software development.

Technically robotics isn't mainstream, Javascript/PHP/Java/C# are, at least in terms of developers. Now in terms of code deployed, C on the billions of embedded devices may be able to compete with servers?

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#74

Post by frozenport »

dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

C++ for its libraries

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#75

Post by secondcoming »

ncmncm wrote: post #55
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

I've been writing C++ professionally for 16 years. I'm doing it right now in fact, but snuck on to HN while a build is underway.

OP is right, unfortunately. C++ is a dying language. Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all looking at Rust. Why? Because it's probably makes more sense to rewrite a buggy C++ component in Rust instead of updating it to use modern C++ (where admittedly, you have to go out of your way to get things wrong). The damage has been done.

I'm also concerned about our ability to hire in the future. C++ devs will either be too expensive, or just not there since it's not an attractive language any more.

I'm not a Rustafarian either, I've actually never used it but it would be negligent of me to not look at it. One concern I have with it is that the eco-system may be full of poor-quality ports of C/C++ libs, because that's how people work when they learn a new language.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#76

Post by rational_indian »

ncmncm wrote: post #55
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

>Rust found a ready audience in people intimidated by C++, frustrated with the limitations of C, Java, and Go, and ready to try something wholly new.

What about people not intimidated by C++ and want to switch to Rust anyway? Why have you discounted them? Do such people exist in your world view? Do you think there might be a good reason for those people to choose Rust?

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#77

Post by nix23 »

tutfbhuf wrote: post #61
ncmncm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

> 3. C++ and Rust will coexist for decades. Nah, I mean maybe in the way that Fortran coexist with C/C++ for decades, but it's not equal coexistence. I would rather say that new languages arise, replaces old ones for most scenarios and in the cases where they can't, due to various reasons, they push the old language into zombie state like cobol.

You don't replace languages but program's, go into physic-space, fortran is alive an well, go into systems programming c is alive an well, go into business java is alive and well.

It's the same BS like NoSql will kill all R-D's.

You just don't invest millions just to rewrite programs that work's perfectly (and that's often the case with old battle-hardened software)

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#78

Post by tastyminerals2 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #4

The syntax is nicer. Granted, I'm not very familiar with D. I didn't even know it had a borrow checker. Rust took a lot of great features from Haskell, while keeping itself reasonably approachable from a C/C++/D/Java programmer's perspective. Rust put type names after variable/function/parameter names, which really cleans up the syntax nicely. Rust has very nice syntax for pattern matching, monads, and a slew of othe…

One of the reasons why I haven't approached Rust is its syntax. Subjectively ugly and polluted with punctuation symbols that tell you little about their semantics. D looks cleaner and more readable even for a person not familiar with the language. D's readability is on par with scripting languages. Rust is far away from that.

Type names after variable or before? When you think about declaring a variable, do you think about its type of name first? I can't imagine you do the latter because "Hmm, I need an array of doubles to represent my tensor" is double[][] tensor; and not tensor: double[][]. Besides the types after names end up being more verbose in the languages which adopt the scheme (hello Scala).

I invite you to get familiar with D syntax to see a wider picture.

The borrow checker in D is WIP and given how much stir it created, I don't see it's happening any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#79

Post by tastyminerals2 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #3

It seems to me that D has been too many places and has too many features. My impression is that D sometimes uses a GC, sometimes not. I believe I can do many interesting things in D once I learn the language well enough to pick a certain subset of features, much like C++. In other words, if I want to write GC free code in D I have to learn what NOT to use. If I want to pick a subset of features, I'd probably pick C++…

True. But unlike C++ or Rust, D is not a difficult language at all. You can easily understand when and how not to use GC. Which data structures require allocation and which can circumvent it. There is an ongoing work to make std a @nogc compatible. There is an excellent community of professionals to learn from. The problem is, it is small and resources are scarce. If only D had a bigger company backing it up...

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#80

Post by boygobbo »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #35
jdxcode wrote: post #9

Engineers learn languages because of success stories by other companies—not by the merits of the syntax or one-off tricks like compiling itself in 5 seconds. The fact that Firefox uses Rust for the browser engine or that Dropbox uses Rust for the sync engine is the kind of thing that gets me interested.

I've never heard of a commercial success built off the back of Racket or J but happily went through a book on Racket and would love to do the same for J.

Then I recommend https://www.jsoftware.com/help/jforc/contents.htm
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