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Exploring Rust (from C#)

nblumhardt.com

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Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#61

Post by scott_s »

blub wrote: post #22
qz_ wrote: post #3

Could someone explain why Rust is so damn popular/controversial?

Technical reasons alone don't clarify what's happening. Everyone's explaining basically why "Rust is awesome", which is not what was asked. It's popular because Rust fans are heavily promoting it on HN as the solution to certain classes of programming errors. 2016 is probably going to be the year of Rust on HN, generally there's a new language every year such as Ruby, Javascript, etc. This year Go is a strong competi…

I find your comment surprising, since Rust has been discussed on HN for over five years. It's been a popular topic for the past several. I also don't see much controversy, or "fire". It's interesting, so people are talking about it.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#62

Post by tavert »

gjm11 wrote: post #20
skoczymroczny wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people are looking for a replacement for C++ that isn't C#/Java. As in a language that is still low-level enough to offer stuff like pointers, but without the pitfalls and minefield which is C++ (a lot of which is due to historic reasons and backwards compatibility with C). Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the backgro…

> Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the background. Nim is frustrating, because to my taste it gets so many things just right while getting one particular thing so spectacularly wrong that I can't bring myself even to try it. The one thing is its rule for when two identifiers are the same. They are compared case-insensitively, ignoring…

Is there any documentation or discussion on the justification for doing this? I'm scratching my head and asking why anyone would do this intentionally...

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#63

Post by gedrap »

h43k3r wrote: post #12
nblumhardt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you - was a bit of an unexpected appearance here so getting onto the erm, technical issues, now...

A quick solution could be to host the page as a static page and have a nginx route serve that page.

HTML caching at nginx level would do the trick as well, assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#65

Post by bryanlarsen »

gjm11 wrote: post #20
skoczymroczny wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people are looking for a replacement for C++ that isn't C#/Java. As in a language that is still low-level enough to offer stuff like pointers, but without the pitfalls and minefield which is C++ (a lot of which is due to historic reasons and backwards compatibility with C). Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the backgro…

> Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the background. Nim is frustrating, because to my taste it gets so many things just right while getting one particular thing so spectacularly wrong that I can't bring myself even to try it. The one thing is its rule for when two identifiers are the same. They are compared case-insensitively, ignoring…

Sure, it's a misfeature, IMO, but it's certainly not a reason to write off the language.

No matter what language you use, if you have two variables named myVariable and my_variable in the same scope, you've created a huge land mine in your code, and your linter should complain. Eventually somebody's going to come along and mix the two up.

The fact that nim blows up differently than every other language just makes it more obvious that this is something you just shouldn't do.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#66

Post by Rusky »

tomp wrote: post #35
Certhas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collections criticism is bizarre. How often do you actually have to use "unsafe" in practice? Collections is one example, but it seems to be quite atypical, and not something you'd typically implement yourself. The argument has always been that it reduces the amount of code you have to check for safety manually. Most of it will be checked by the compiler. Have you run into the problem that most of your code is un…

> The argument has always been that it reduces the amount of code you have to check for safety manually. No, Rust's argument is that it eliminates memory unsafety. It even says so on it's front page: "guaranteed memory safety". Except that it's not guaranteed. It relies on you trusting code that (supposedly) expert programmers have written, and which has been reviewed hundreds of times. Which is no better than C. I a…

Even if the language pulled some magic trick where it could verify collection implementations without unsafe, all you'd have done is move the unsafety into the type checker and compiler backend.

The only difference is that Rust 1) moved some of that into the stdlib and 2) lets third parties extend it to provide more guarantees.

Given this, I think you're drawing a rather arbitrary line- Rust (the compiler + stdlib, optionally + other libraries wrapping unsafe) does guarantee memory safety, full stop. Whether the guarantees are provided by the stdlib or compiler is irrelevant.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#67

Post by mseri »

mseri wrote: post #16
h43k3r wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is offtopic but what should be size of the VM to handle HN's front page traffic. I know a lot of it depends upon whether the website is static or is backed by DB and on various different factors. But many a times some of my friends ask me questions like this. To make it simple, lets take 2 very basic websites. 1. A ghost blog. (node.js) 2. A wordpress blog backed by a mysql db. (php)

I had a ghost blog on a micro instance of a german VPN, a machine with 256mb of ram and not too fast processing power. Both times I reached HN home page, in one case for some hours, it worked without issues and only a minor slowdown.

VPN was meant to be VPS but I cannot edit the post

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#68

Post by pjmlp »

vvanders wrote: post #60
pjmlp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done my share of critics regarding Go team decisions, but one thing they got right is that Go is indeed a systems programming language. My understanding being that a systems programming language is one that can be used to bootstrap itself and build a full OS stack with the exception of some Assembly for interfacing with the underlying hardware. As of Go 1.6, the language certainly fulfils this description. If…

Last I checked Go doesn't have any memory placement semantics. That's a non-starter IMO for a systems programming language. I like performance in my systems programming languages and you won't get that if you can't control where your memory lives.

> Last I checked Go doesn't have any memory placement semantics.

Many OSes like Oberon, Cedar, Topaz, SPIN among others were written in languages without direct support for it, so it is possible to write an OS without it.

The runtime package just needs to offer the services for it, just like many C functions are actually implemented in Assembly.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#69

Post by gjm11 »

nyan4 wrote: post #59
gjm11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the background. Nim is frustrating, because to my taste it gets so many things just right while getting one particular thing so spectacularly wrong that I can't bring myself even to try it. The one thing is its rule for when two identifiers are the same. They are compared case-insensitively, ignoring…

This criticism usually comes from people that do not use Nim. I was very surprised as well at first - now after 1 year of using Nim I realize I never run into any trouble because of case/underscore insensitivity. #1: those variables have to be in the same scope or be procs working on the same types to be an issue. #2: I don't use nimgrep, I just keep a consistent style across my files. When reading somebody else's co…

I suspect this criticism usually comes from people who don't use Nim because anyone inclined to be bothered by it will not use Nim for that reason.

I agree that "just keep a consistent style" is a good approach for single-person projects. It's harder to keep it working well as you get more people working on the code, though.

Re: Exploring Rust (from C#)

#70

Post by sunsetandlabrea »

tavert wrote: post #62
gjm11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some newer languages that try to fill the niche are D, Nim, Rust and Go. Can't say much about Nim, it seems to be in the background. Nim is frustrating, because to my taste it gets so many things just right while getting one particular thing so spectacularly wrong that I can't bring myself even to try it. The one thing is its rule for when two identifiers are the same. They are compared case-insensitively, ignoring…

Is there any documentation or discussion on the justification for doing this? I'm scratching my head and asking why anyone would do this intentionally...

I don't use nim, so I couldn't point you to the justification. But as I understand it is so an individual can choose his style preferences. myVariable or my_variable.
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