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One year of Rust

blog.rust-lang.org

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Re: One year of Rust

#41

Post by kibwen »

diminish wrote: post #28

Hey HN, do you knoe Any notable projects or startups using Rust? Web, desktop apps, scientific or algorithmic computing etc?

See https://www.rust-lang.org/friends.html for a list of companies using Rust (perhaps most notably Dropbox and Mozilla), but here are some non-corporate projects off the top of my head:

Panopticon, a cross-platform disassembler: https://panopticon.re/

Redox, an everything-is-a-URL microkernel OS: http://www.redox-os.org/

Piston, a modular collection of libraries for game development: http://www.piston.rs/

Pijul, a next-gen implementation of Darcs: http://pijul.org/

Xi, a high-performance text editor: https://github.com/google/xi-editor

timely-dataflow, "a low-latency cyclic dataflow computational model" (i.e. big data shenanigans): https://github.com/frankmcsherry/timely-dataflow

Re: One year of Rust

#42

Post by Lewisham »

steveklabnik wrote: post #38
Lewisham wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say rustdoc is pretty rough. It's very hard to navigate the rust stdlib vs, say, Go, and when you do find what you want, it's often specified in some very cryptic manner that seems to require a PL PhD. It is a really big barrier to adoption because it's very hard to find out what functionality is or is not offered. Here's an example: I want to iterate over a set. Easy, right? No. http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/m…

If you (or anyone really) has specific thoughts here, that'd be super great. Rustdoc's output could use a lot of love, but we haven't figured out exactly what we want to do with it. And having worked with it daily for a few years now, I'm personally a bit blind to its shortcomings.

Specific thought: Trait implementation pages like http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/collections/hash_... should output the first paragraph of the documentation text. That way you can easily scan/Ctrl+F through the documentation that's right next to the struct you're interested in. Reduce the number of clicks and context switches.

It's just a pretty terrifying way to output right now.

Re: One year of Rust

#43

Post by steveklabnik »

Lewisham wrote: post #42
steveklabnik wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you (or anyone really) has specific thoughts here, that'd be super great. Rustdoc's output could use a lot of love, but we haven't figured out exactly what we want to do with it. And having worked with it daily for a few years now, I'm personally a bit blind to its shortcomings.

Specific thought: Trait implementation pages like http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/collections/hash_... should output the first paragraph of the documentation text. That way you can easily scan/Ctrl+F through the documentation that's right next to the struct you're interested in. Reduce the number of clicks and context switches. It's just a pretty terrifying way to output right now.

Ah, just saw your edit. So, to be clear about what you mean, you want the Iterator implementation to show the summary line on this page? Seems reasonable to me! I filed a bug: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/33672

(Also, that page is a bit sparse because I haven't gotten around to writing any docs for it yet, so it's just the autogenerated stuff.)

Re: One year of Rust

#44

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

Lewisham wrote: post #37
merb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the tooling, could be better. A language like Rust will benefit from a rich IDE a lot. But still the language is great.

I'd say rustdoc is pretty rough. It's very hard to navigate the rust stdlib vs, say, Go, and when you do find what you want, it's often specified in some very cryptic manner that seems to require a PL PhD. It is a really big barrier to adoption because it's very hard to find out what functionality is or is not offered. Here's an example: I want to iterate over a set. Easy, right? No. http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/m…

I actually get the opposite feeling. Maybe that's because I'm so used to rustdoc now, but it's super easy to find everything. Go's doc tool seems like just a giant dump of API signatures.

Rustdoc isn't perfect, but it's pretty easy to find things imo.

Re: One year of Rust

#45

Post by richardfontana »

steveklabnik wrote: post #19
monocasa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will that talk be available online at some point?

I hope so. I gave it at FOSDEM in 2015, only intending to give it one time, and then they lost all of the video from the keynote track :( So I'm giving it again there to hopefully get it on the record.

That was a really good talk, one of the highlights of that FOSDEM for me.

Re: One year of Rust

#46

Post by steveklabnik »

richardfontana wrote: post #45
steveklabnik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so. I gave it at FOSDEM in 2015, only intending to give it one time, and then they lost all of the video from the keynote track :( So I'm giving it again there to hopefully get it on the record.

That was a really good talk, one of the highlights of that FOSDEM for me.

Thanks so much! I was so sad when they lost the recording :(

Re: One year of Rust

#48

Post by kibwen »

steveklabnik wrote: post #6
grenoire wrote: post #2

One year since stable? It feels like five years for the level of maturity they have achieved.

Rust has been in development for almost a decade at this point; but the language changed significantly many times before 1.0. It's been one year since the 1.0 release, which is the language we know today as "Rust". All those older languages are dead and gone now. I'm actually doing a talk about the ACM's Applicative conference in NYC this year talking about the history of Rust.

For the record, I take issue with the "almost a decade" label, development on Rust didn't start in earnest until 2010 at the earliest. :P It's about as misleading as saying that Go is 40 years old just because its commit graph goes back that far (https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors).

Re: One year of Rust

#49

Post by _redwire »

One thing I'm really hoping to see happen in Rust is more development to make it more "functional," as in suitable for a functional programming style. It's already so close and, while I don't want to bring up the higher-kinded types discussion, things like stronger support for closures being returned from functions are just not quite there yet for me.

I filled out the survey that was sent around and mentioned some of my concerns about missing crypto-in-Rust code and some of the shortcomings of the documentation. I'm pretty happy I'm not the only one mentioning one or both of those things, because it makes me hopeful that we'll see improvements soon. In particular, regarding docs, I've found it rather difficult to go from reading a type signature and brief explanation of a function/method and being able to actually use it, as a beginner. For example, when I tried to figure out Hyper, it took me a long time to realize I could use pattern matching in my function signatures to capture a mutable reference to something that Hyper was giving me ownership over. I feel silly having missed that, but being a beginner just referencing the Hyper docs, I really struggled.

Does anyone have more information about the crypto situation? In particular, I use ECDSA 384-bit for a lot of the code I write at work and have only been able to find the Ring library, which doesn't seem to feature signing yet. If I could get some high-quality, audited crypto code (or heck, even just some nice Rusty wrappers), I'd be so close to ready to use Rust at my day job and for more personal stuff as well.

Re: One year of Rust

#50

Post by nilved »

_redwire wrote: post #49

One thing I'm really hoping to see happen in Rust is more development to make it more "functional," as in suitable for a functional programming style. It's already so close and, while I don't want to bring up the higher-kinded types discussion, things like stronger support for closures being returned from functions are just not quite there yet for me. I filled out the survey that was sent around and mentioned some of…

I think this ship sailed when Rust removed function purity. Rust is a Scala, not a Haskell.
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