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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]

#71

I'd love to see someone write a game engine in Rust to compete with the "big boys" like Cry or Unreal. C++ game code can be such a nightmare.

It would be in Rust too.

True enough. However, I'm willing to bet that a non-trivial amount of nightmarish code in C++ comes from the language itself. Also, I'm willing to be that a Rust build would be an improvement over a C++ build. As an example, I'm really sick of header files.

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

#72

The state of Rust editors continues to evolve [1], but I would be curious to learn more about the editors/IDEs that people are using for Rust development. Any stories or thoughts? [1] https://areweideyet.com/

rust-mode[0] has worked well for me so far. But I haven't written anything major with rust yet.

[0][https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-mode]

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

#73
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.

The system programming is done in either C or C++

Rust is addressed to some of the shortcomings of those. This implies there would a competitive advantage of doing systems programming in Rust, if it succeeds in addressing them.

So far, it does look like it's succeeding there.

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

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#75

The state of Rust editors continues to evolve [1], but I would be curious to learn more about the editors/IDEs that people are using for Rust development. Any stories or thoughts? [1] https://areweideyet.com/

I'm using IntelliJ-Rust [1]. Doesn't go to the definition of macros, and sometimes auto-complete doesn't work, but - it's comfortable enough to use.

[1] https://intellij-rust.github.io/

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

#76
post #51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you have the extra RAM and power for a GC, you don't need Rust for safety.

It isn't just about memory; Rust's safety guarantees in combination with RAII also mean that other resources such as mutex locks, open files, etc. also get closed in a deterministic fashion. (I'd argue that this is quite important for locks, but I've ran into hard-to-debug bugs b/c files weren't being closed out until a GC got to them.)

The way I've always viewed it is that RAII is general to all resources; GC only solves memory.

(I'm assuming the comment you're responding to is discussing getting a concurrent GC to work quite right, which isn't fully relevant w/ my reply; but I do think there is more to Rust's safety than just the memory management, which is what I got from your reply. I'd also argue that memory, in particular, is not abundant, both on mobile devices, but also out in the cloud, where it translates directly into cost both from more expensive VM instances, and from me needing to continually tweak the GC's params.)

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

#77
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project like Servo means that the proof will be in the pudding. Gecko and WebKit/Blink are C++ (though stuck at C++11 due to compiler and platform compatibility). So we'll see how they end up comparing.

I really wish that they replace Firefox with a browser written using Servo. That'll be fun.

https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a...

The intention is to replace the parts where Servo > Gecko.

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

#78
post #42

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?

I'd say Python did stop Ruby roughly 2006. ;)

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=python%20pr...

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

#79
post #42

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?

[deleted]

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

#80

The state of Rust editors continues to evolve [1], but I would be curious to learn more about the editors/IDEs that people are using for Rust development. Any stories or thoughts? [1] https://areweideyet.com/

vim + racer do the job, but you have to annotate types quite a bit for autocomplete to work. I'd love it if there was a way to auto-annotate variables like the haskell plugin does it.
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