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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?

#231

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by ssokolow »

daenney wrote: post #99
k__ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of old age I mean. It's like with everything. Most people simply do what they always did, most never reinvent themselves.

> Of old age I mean. Yeah I get that. I asked why they should die. Not how or by what means. > It's like with everything. Most people simply do what they always did, most never reinvent themselves. Based on? And note that we're not talking about "most people", we're talking about a very specific subset of people. Considering the changes in popularity of programming languages and the recent surges in adoption of Go an…

It's a pattern that's been well documented in the scientific community. You generally get a burst of innovation when enough of an older generation of scientists dies off for their ossified cognitive habits to stop holding back the more correct of the theories that have arisen in the mean time.

(Don't ask me to cite it though. I don't have time to go digging back through the textbooks from my "scientific reasoning" course.)

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

#233

Post by burntsushi »

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.

"Manipulation"? Really? Please.

> And you would reply that almost everyone use it, because everyone is shipping their apps with Docker.

Seems reasonable. Docker is a pretty compelling data point for the viability of Go for writing systems tooling.

This argument still seems strange and very petty.

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

#234

Post by ssokolow »

pcwalton wrote: post #48
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…

> 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…

I prefer to think of the difference being "In classical inheritance, verbs are members of nouns, but, in Rust, you define your nouns and verbs as distinct top-level identities, then define the valid relationships between them."

Thinking about it in that sense, classical inheritance has always been based on a fundamentally flawed abstract model.

(Admittedly, purely noun-to-noun inheritance does have its place in a well-structured abstract model, in cases like "every Teacher is a Person", but I stand by Rust's decision to omit it... at least in the near term, because developers are too used to overusing/abusing it out of habit.)

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

#235

Post by camgunz »

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.

Yeah Tokio is the answer and what I'm referring to. All I meant was if you implement M:N in Rust it'll be slower than Go. I think this is probably the right answer, as segmented stacks cost you C interoperability, but it's not right for everything.

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

#236

Post by steveklabnik »

ssokolow wrote: post #228
steveklabnik wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Which is very different than most Rust code!

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

#238

Post by steveklabnik »

Rusky wrote: post #218
steveklabnik wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? I hadn't heard of this before! I wonder if we can fix that...

Rust can totally compile on console platforms- it's been done, e.g. on PS4 ( https://twitter.com/wickerwaka/status/479842553831776257 ), as I'm sure you've seen, Steve :) The problem (speaking as someone working on a console game at a AAA studio) is more likely that it's not officially supported. Console SDKs include C++ toolchains and C++ libraries, and there's a lot to lose by trying to bypass that, especially on a…

Yeah, I knew it was possible for some definition of possible; I just didn't know that any game studios were using it in any capacity, let alone a studio like DICE.

The support thing makes total sense. Do you think it's fundamentally insurmountable? I'm pretty sure this is an area where the team itself has a blind spot, or maybe rather, just doesn't have the necessary expertise to even know what we'd need to do to make this possible.

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

#239

Post by lossolo »

burntsushi wrote: post #233
lossolo wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Manipulation"? Really? Please. > And you would reply that almost everyone use it, because everyone is shipping their apps with Docker. Seems reasonable. Docker is a pretty compelling data point for the viability of Go for writing systems tooling. This argument still seems strange and very petty.

> "Manipulation"? Really? Please. > This argument still seems strange and very petty.

Those are not an arguments for anything. What I wrote still stands. It's clear that author asked which company use (writes) Rust besides Mozilla, not which company integrate third party tools that was written in Rust - it's logical.

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

#240

Post by lossolo »

dbaupp wrote: post #230
lossolo wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't the first one that made that claim. And I don't know the author of the comment that made it and I am not involved with anything that author do - something you can't say yourself in context of person you are defending. I've asked couple of people about that question without suggesting the answer and all of them agree with interpretation that it's about writing software in language A, not using third party tools written in language A.

Example of usage outside of company like in question from arstechnica:

"Outside of Google, companies like Wrike, Workiva, Blossom and others have also been using Dart to develop their products, so there is definitely still a Dart user community outside of Google, too."

This is how everyone interpret that question.

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