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Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

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Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#51

Post by pron »

hinkley wrote: post #40
pron wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even high-powered hardware can take a "major" hit from a GC pause when your application is extremely latency sensitive. That's true, but high-powered, abundant-RAM realtime applications can use approaches that are cheaper than Rust's. See, e.g., the interesting work currently being done updating realtime Java[1]. The idea is that memory is composed of a few kinds of lifetimes: eternal, scoped and GCed-heap. Scoped…

If I had infinite free time, I'd love to explore the problem space of implementing interpreters for GC-based languages on top of Rust. It's quite hard to get the concurrency right, and indeed we see a number of major languages that gave up on even trying.

What for? If you have the extra RAM and power for a GC, you don't need Rust for safety. HotSpot's next-gen (JIT) compiler is written in Java and is absolutely amazing.

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#52

Post by yedpodtrzitko »

cryptrash wrote: post #34
shmerl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Did you mix it up with something else? Rust community is one of the best. And what's "dangerous and unstable" there?

Of course I didnt. Klabnik is practically a communist, lots of anti-American sentiments, etc. Pcwalton has been spamming HN for ages about rust. They're all terrible. I've heard rumors of memory vulns in rust as well.

> I've heard rumors of memory vulns in rust as well.

I guess you did read it on the internet, so it has to be truth. Are you referring to that clickbait "Heartbleed in Rust"?

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#53

Post by steveklabnik »

gutfuck wrote: post #44

I've literally seen you tweet at people to kill themselves and then delete it. Idk about any of this other stuff but you certainly can't claim that your hands are clean in all this.

I do not tell people to kill themselves, as that's not cool.

That said, I'm not interested in replying to brand new accounts made to troll me (and conveniently without evidence), so I won't be replying further.

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#54

Post by gutfuck »

steveklabnik wrote: post #53
gutfuck wrote: post #44

I've literally seen you tweet at people to kill themselves and then delete it. Idk about any of this other stuff but you certainly can't claim that your hands are clean in all this.

I do not tell people to kill themselves, as that's not cool. That said, I'm not interested in replying to brand new accounts made to troll me (and conveniently without evidence), so I won't be replying further.

I'm sure you won't, don't want somebody to see this and post some screenshots. Wish I had taken some myself!

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#55

Post by shandor »

wyldfire wrote: post #3

> GC pause ... sufficiently low power hw .. cheap phone Yeah, but even high-powered hardware can take a "major" hit from a GC pause when your application is extremely latency sensitive. IMO it would be great to get folks who write the enormous base of existing realtime apps driving critical devices everywhere to sit up and take notice of Rust. EDIT: I mean to say that many of my colleagues who write realtime software…

> IMO it would be great to get folks who write the enormous base of existing realtime apps driving critical devices everywhere to sit up and take notice of Rust.

It would, and definitely should, move into the direction of safer languages than C.

The biggest problem I see is tooling and legacy. Tooling, because there's a ginormous amount of testing and design software that "works with C" (whatever that means in the context of the tool). Legacy, because everyone already has their 20 year old codebases and it's just not convenient to start focusing on two languages and switching the old code to Rust is just plain impossible economically.

Third problem is compiler. LLVM (rustc is a frontend to it, no?) is really good choice, but gcc has enormous advantage in supporting so many small platforms and it's very significant in this area of SW dev.

On the plus side, I've really gotten the impression that the Rust folks are truly trying to make adoption as smooth as possible. If that works, and Rust proves to be much better than C for these kinds of systems, I'd guess adopting Rust rather than not would start looking economically viable to companies. I mean, in the end that's what matters to them the most, and it's not easy to replace all you C ninjas with competent Rust writer.

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#57

Post by user5994461 »

kibwen wrote: post #42
VoidAgent wrote: post #33

IMO C++ is unstoppable now, c++ 11, 14 and 17 additions with GSL and all things in the pipeline ...

Rust doesn't need to stop C++ to be successful. The market for programmers is already large enough to successfully support dozens of programming languages, and that market will only continue to grow. PHP didn't "stop" Perl, Python didn't "stop" PHP, Ruby didn't "stop" Python, and yet all of these languages continue to be enormously successful. Why should we expect a monoculture on the systems side?

What's the place for Rust in the market?

The distributed systems have already moved to Go (when it's not Java/C# :D).

The system programming is done in either C or C++. (Depending on history and availability).

The oldest stuff and/or most constrained is stuck with C. They're struggling to have anything moved over to C++. Rust is entirely out of question.

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#59

Post by baq »

VoidAgent wrote: post #33

IMO C++ is unstoppable now, c++ 11, 14 and 17 additions with GSL and all things in the pipeline ...

rust does things C++ simply cannot and will never do. that doesn't mean rust is strictly better. actually i believe C++ and rust should be best friends; there's only this small ABI issue - i hear smart people are working on it, though.

Re: Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]

#60

Post by baq »

user5994461 wrote: post #57
kibwen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust doesn't need to stop C++ to be successful. The market for programmers is already large enough to successfully support dozens of programming languages, and that market will only continue to grow. PHP didn't "stop" Perl, Python didn't "stop" PHP, Ruby didn't "stop" Python, and yet all of these languages continue to be enormously successful. Why should we expect a monoculture on the systems side?

What's the place for Rust in the market? The distributed systems have already moved to Go (when it's not Java/C# :D). The system programming is done in either C or C++. (Depending on history and availability). The oldest stuff and/or most constrained is stuck with C. They're struggling to have anything moved over to C++. Rust is entirely out of question.

and yet the ecosystem grows every day.
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