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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?

#221

Post by Rusky »

mmstick wrote: post #180
lossolo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean hobbyist ? All the AAA games are still written in C++, none of the big studios is even considering to switch. Rust type system/restrictions would get into the way more than it would help in AAA game dev. Memory safety is not a problem in game development, they will just patch the bugs. Studios have whole ecosystems written in C++ that works for them. Benefits are really low compared to costs, that's why it's…

Type restrictions aren't really a problem, but in fact really helps out game development in the long run. > Memory safety is not a problem in game development, they will just patch the bugs. You must not have played any Bethesda titles. That said, there is much more to Rust than memory safety. That's just a side effect of the safe parallelism -- it's a minor story.

This is nonsense. I would love to use Rust in games (I currently work in games) but it's not clear that it would work out. That opinion is shared by game developers far more experienced and prominent than myself.

I (and I presume many others) would appreciate it if you would stop making grand, unfounded assertions about what Rust is good for. Games do make very different tradeoffs from most software- type and memory safety aren't an obvious, uncontested win there.

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

#222

Post by lossolo »

burntsushi wrote: post #210
flukus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But shipping a program using rust != using rust. If that was the case I've used Erlang despite never having written a single line of it because I've shipped rabbitmq.

This is a strange argument I find myself in. What do you expect me to say? They're shipping a Rust application I wrote. That's a fact. Do with it what you will.

No, it's not strange. What you wrote can be interpreted as manipulation. It's the same as replying to question "Who uses Go besides Google?" And you would reply that almost everyone use it, because everyone is shipping their apps with Docker. You see manipulation here? I don't know if intentionally or not but you did exactly the same.

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

#223

Post by Rusky »

kixunil wrote: post #219
camgunz wrote: post #170

I think it's important to consider the implications if Rust doesn't become a mainstream programming language. I'm not shy about my dislike of Rust. I like C, I don't think avoiding buffer overflows and memory errors is that hard, and I chafe at the idea of a language I dislike aesthetically taking over systems programming. But even I have to admit the arguments for using C instead of Rust are niche. Sure there's prob…

> It doesn't use segmented stacks so it doesn't achieve the M:N performance of Go Actually, if you use Tokio or similar approach, you achieve better performance than Go (no need to re-allocate stacks) while code is still quite readable and boilerplate-free.

They seem to be aware: ", but it has memory and data race safety, OS threads, and futures, so no problem."

However, futures are certainly not boilerplate-free. They destroy your ability to use native control flow the way you can with threads (M:N or 1:1). You can get some of that back with async/await, but Rust doesn't have that and it's still not boilerplate-free.

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

#225

Post by leshow »

gorthol wrote: post #199
sssilver wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work on several languages professionally being the only one without exceptions Go and I don't see how its idiotic pattern of checking the value returned after every single call is a massive improvement on anything except masochism.

Go's "error" system is nothing like Rusts. I personally find Go's terrible and boilerplate-y.

Rust's uses algebraic types to make things checked at compile time and uses operators like `?` to give you expressiveness while removing the overhead and annoyance of manually checking everything. It is a huge improvement.

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

#226

Post by leshow »

soulbadguy wrote: post #123
mmstick wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be downright appalled if Rust were to start promoting exceptions. It's an anti-feature.

Being this emotionally invested in a feature, really is unprofessional...

Hyperbole is lost on you, it seems.

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

#227

Post by leshow »

Animats wrote: post #27

I had great hopes for Rust as the future of systems programming, but they've decreased over time. Parts of the language are just too cute. The borrow checker was brilliant. Any future language that doesn't use garbage collection will have to have one. That was the big advance in Rust. But the object system (yeah, they're called structures and traits) is too weird. The enum approach to variant records is too weird. Th…

The fact that you think all these features are 'weird' just solidifies you haven't used a typed language with any modern features

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

#228

Post by ssokolow »

steveklabnik wrote: post #164
parenthephobia wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Doesn't Vala use reference counting? [1] I'm not actually sure; do you have some pointers I could read here? 1: http://www.vala-project.org/doc/vala/Overview.html#Memory_ma...

From what I remember, it just uses GLib's system for implementing reference-counted pointers in C and is equivalent to using Rc or Arc everywhere in Rust.

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

#229

Post by fasquoika »

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.

That's the point. IIRC it's called Rust to allude to the fact that there's nothing really new in the language

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

#230

Post by dbaupp »

lossolo wrote: post #222
burntsushi wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strange argument I find myself in. What do you expect me to say? They're shipping a Rust application I wrote. That's a fact. Do with it what you will.

No, it's not strange. What you wrote can be interpreted as manipulation. It's the same as replying to question "Who uses Go besides Google?" And you would reply that almost everyone use it, because everyone is shipping their apps with Docker. You see manipulation here? I don't know if intentionally or not but you did exactly the same.

FWIW, a common argument in favour of C and C++ is how it is used by pretty much everything that one runs on a computer, in exactly the same sense of "use". I think you're tilting at windmills: some people mean "use" to mean "ship" and others "write", and neither are that unreasonable.
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