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Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#101

Post by soulbadguy »

jostmon wrote: post #92
soulbadguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I gave you a trove of real world examples of serious security issues in widely used software developed by competent teams. Quite a few of these would have not existed in a language with the kind of guarantees that Rust provides. How is this disingenuous? Genuine question : do we know that those bugs would have been avoided using rust? Maybe some of those part would have had to be done unsafe mode for some reasons.…

You seem to be presupposing that all, or much of the C/C++ written today will follow best practices and be written by "expert" programers. A portion will, perhaps even a substantial portion, but I'd be willing to wager a far larger portion of the Rust written today will follow best practices and doesn't have to be written by expert programers. This is because the safety in Rust isn't optional, like it is with C/C++ b…

> You seem to be presupposing that all, or much of the C/C++ written today will follow best practices and be written by "expert" programmers

No, the argument i am trying to make is that if someone wants safe and reliable code, it's possible to buy that in C/C++ at cheaper price than to migrate to whole new language and platform.

> I'd be willing to wager a far larger portion of the Rust written today will follow best practices

Yes, as you mentioned that's by design. But i don't that the metric we should be looking at : in the group of people/team/compagny who actually care about safety and performance ( and let's be honest that group is the biggest one), what proportion will be using C++ vs rust.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#102

Post by pcwalton »

soulbadguy wrote: post #98
pcwalton wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a much more interesting question is how much safer a code written in rust today would be vs a C/C++ code written today , reflecting our current understanding and knowledge on how to build safe system. A lot safer, judging by browser exploits.

> reflecting our current understanding and knowledge on how to build safe system...

Browser engines are more indicative of the current "understanding and knowledge of how to build safe systems" than nearly any C++ codebase in existence.

Part of the current "understanding and knowledge of how to build safe systems" is to use a memory-safe language.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#103

Post by sidlls »

pcwalton wrote: post #100
sidlls wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't seem like a helpful way to advocate for Rust. It's a critique of the comment but doesn't address the commenter's concerns.

Because "addressing" the concerns would make Rust a worse language. 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. 2. Changing the keyword "enum" to something else is a cosmetic change which would make as many users unhappy as it made happy. (We know, because we soli…

I didn't suggest changing the Rust language. There are other ways to address concerns than by saying "you're wrong," which is effectively what your comment did.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#104

Post by parenthephobia »

Animats wrote: post #65
tomjakubowski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the object system (yeah, they're called structures and traits) is too weird. It's equivalent to writing C++ with: * No structural inheritance (i.e. no inheritance of data) * Inheritance only from pure virtual interface classes * MyCppPureVirtualClass * pointers in various interfaces Except that traits are also usable for static dispatch as in templates/concepts. This isn't the most common style of C++, but it's…

I can't think of much real originality in Rust. It just brings together "exotic" features from lesser-known languages. I think you're right. Except for the borrow checker, which was a major breakthrough.

Compile-time checking of owned and borrowed references was in Vala, a C#-inspired language for the GNOME ecosystem, four years earlier.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#105

Post by soulbadguy »

pcwalton wrote: post #100
sidlls wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment doesn't seem like a helpful way to advocate for Rust. It's a critique of the comment but doesn't address the commenter's concerns.

Because "addressing" the concerns would make Rust a worse language. 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. 2. Changing the keyword "enum" to something else is a cosmetic change which would make as many users unhappy as it made happy. (We know, because we soli…

Nitpick : > 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. Classes and interface can be implemented without indirect dispatch...

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#106

Post by soulbadguy »

pcwalton wrote: post #95
soulbadguy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not mandate them , use have them as an options where the monadic Errors types are not enough or are too cumbersome to use.

And thereby prevent people from writing code that needs to catch errors but can't use exceptions. Won't work.

I don't understand what that sentence means...

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#107

Post by sssilver »

soulbadguy wrote: post #68
pcwalton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the object system (yeah, they're called structures and traits) is too weird. So you praise Go for having structures and interfaces, but you criticize Rust for having structures and interfaces because that's "too weird". > The enum approach to variant records is too weird. Why? Because of the keyword? Swift uses that keyword too! > The error handling is too weird. What would you rather see? > The half-functional…

>> The error handling is too weird. >What would you rather see? Exceptions

Just curious, have you ever used any other modern languages that do not use exceptions for error handling? Most people who complain are just used to the exception way, but once you embrace returning errors out of functions, it really does feel like a massive improvement in terms of the paradigm.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#108

Post by CalChris »

pcwalton wrote: post #83
CalChris wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Rust doesn't differ from Go, from Swift, from Ruby, from JavaScript in these regards then perhaps, as was pointed earlier, Rust didn't know when to stop. It seems to violate the Law of Parsimony. I like Rust's borrow checker and that's pretty much it. Sometimes I think CRust would be a good idea, the minimal ideas that I like from Rust just layered on top of C as a linter.

> If Rust doesn't differ from Go, from Swift, from Ruby, from JavaScript in these regards then perhaps, as was pointed earlier, Rust didn't know when to stop. It seems to violate the Law of Parsimony. The point is that these ideas are not "weird"—they're just decisions taken straight from other languages. I can't believe we have to defend closures , of all things, from the charge of being "weird" because a language f…

  Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast,
  prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
In a systems programming language I can do without closures, without generics, without .... I would and will say the exact same thing about Swift which also provides closures, generics, ....

Us systems programmer types, we tend to drag our knuckles a lot. Still we do have opposable thumbs for grasping tools and we're damned proud of that. Perhaps if and when we sufficiently evolve and attain an upright, high level posture we'll see the light. But for now, be happy that we're trainable if not educable.

Now please excuse me, but I have to go pick some low hanging fruit. That and worse is a lot better.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#109

Post by soulbadguy »

sidlls wrote: post #103
pcwalton wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "addressing" the concerns would make Rust a worse language. 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. 2. Changing the keyword "enum" to something else is a cosmetic change which would make as many users unhappy as it made happy. (We know, because we soli…

I didn't suggest changing the Rust language. There are other ways to address concerns than by saying "you're wrong," which is effectively what your comment did.

Unless the person actually happens to be... you know wrong... Which does happens sometime.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#110

Post by pcwalton »

soulbadguy wrote: post #105
pcwalton wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "addressing" the concerns would make Rust a worse language. 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. 2. Changing the keyword "enum" to something else is a cosmetic change which would make as many users unhappy as it made happy. (We know, because we soli…

Nitpick : > 1. Removing structs and interfaces (in favor of what? Java-style classes and interfaces?) would make Rust more verbose, less of a systems language, and slower at runtime due to the indirect dispatch. Classes and interface can be implemented without indirect dispatch...

Only if you monomorphize interfaces—which gives you Rust's traits.
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