Two years of Rust
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Two years of Rust
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Re: Two years of Rust
#2A few years ago I was a C evangelist. C++ was and more so now is a fine language with a lot of features I want. But Rust has that simplicity in a systems language that I crave that lets me do my own thing. That elegence.
It's my favourite language by far. Keep it up!
Re: Two years of Rust
#3I'm consistently blown away by just how good the project management for this language is. It's not just the forward progress that the language is making (which is considerable), but also just how well they package the information up into a form that the rest of us who are not involved day to day can digest, like has been done here.
Another example is the "This Week in Rust" newsletter which takes progress that would've taken you hours to read about yourself, and puts it into a succinct format that you can get through in minutes [1].
The Rust 2017 roadmap which targeted forward movement on all the language's weakest features was admirable in itself, but even moreso is how much progress has already been made. In particular, I'm really excited about incremental compilation, which is showing as much as 5x speedups in early results [2].
I was also very happy to hear that the Rust team acknowledges that regardless of how performant they are, futures are not a particularly ergonomic or maintainable way to write code, and are considering what new constructs might look like over the longer term:
> Over the rest of this year, we expect all of the above libraries to significantly mature; for a middleware ecosystem to sprout up; for the selection of supported protocols and services to grow; and, quite possibly, to tie all this all together with an async/await notation that works natively with Rust’s futures.
I'm still on dabbling in Rust, but I'm fairly convinced that in another few years after this Tokio churn has gotten a chance to settle down and the async patterns are more broadly refined, there won't be many justifiable reasons to not write new projects in it, whether they're as low level as a Postgres extension, or as high level as a DB-backed HTTP application. It seems to have an almost perfect compromise between performance, safety, productivity, and ecosystem.
[1] https://this-week-in-rust.org/
[2] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/15/rust-at-two-years.html...
Re: Two years of Rust
#4A few years ago I was a C evangelist. C++ was and more so now is a fine language with a lot of features I want. But Rust has that simplicity in a systems language that I crave that lets me do my own thing. That elegence. It's my favourite language by far. Keep it up!
Simplicity? Modula-3 was simple, fast, and safe. PreScheme was less type-checked but powerful and simple. You can learn how to use them in a day coming from an imperative or functional language. Rust looks like it gives users extra power/safety with quite a bit of a learning curve (most say weeks to months) due to extra complexity. Definitely not simple, though.
Re: Two years of Rust
#5Yet again allow me to shill for this year's Rust Community Survey, which closes June 12 and is open even to people who've never used Rust: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/03/survey.html (Yes, I know it's linked from the OP, but who reads that anyway?)
Re: Two years of Rust
#6I'm consistently blown away by just how good the project management for this language is. It's not just the forward progress that the language is making (which is considerable), but also just how well they package the information up into a form that the rest of us who are not involved day to day can digest, like has been done here. Another example is the "This Week in Rust" newsletter which takes progress that would'…
Agreed.
Rust is like a fresh breath of air, and the community around the language is a great example how an OpenSource project can work without being hostile to newcomers. Kudos to the Rust team!
Re: Two years of Rust
#7I'm consistently blown away by just how good the project management for this language is. It's not just the forward progress that the language is making (which is considerable), but also just how well they package the information up into a form that the rest of us who are not involved day to day can digest, like has been done here. Another example is the "This Week in Rust" newsletter which takes progress that would'…
I'm still on dabbling in Rust, but I'm fairly convinced that in another few years after this Tokio churn has gotten a chance to settle down and the async patterns are more broadly refined, there won't be many justifiable reasons to not write new projects in it, whether they're as low level as a Postgres extension or as high level as a DB-backed HTTP application.
Not being hindered by the compiler telling you what you can and can't do; freeing yourself from the write-compile-debug cycle, reducing it to repl-done; etc.
Re: Two years of Rust
#8A few years ago I was a C evangelist. C++ was and more so now is a fine language with a lot of features I want. But Rust has that simplicity in a systems language that I crave that lets me do my own thing. That elegence. It's my favourite language by far. Keep it up!
Simplicity? Modula-3 was simple, fast, and safe. PreScheme was less type-checked but powerful and simple. You can learn how to use them in a day coming from an imperative or functional language. Rust looks like it gives users extra power/safety with quite a bit of a learning curve (most say weeks to months) due to extra complexity. Definitely not simple, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3 https://en.m.w…
It's definitely simpler than most other systems languages in what it gives you access too. Go, D, C++, C# are all far more complicated than Rust is. I would argue Modula-3 is not as simple because it contains a garbage collector - thus making the connection between written and compiled code less simple. Don't know much about pre scheme
Re: Two years of Rust
#9I'm consistently blown away by just how good the project management for this language is. It's not just the forward progress that the language is making (which is considerable), but also just how well they package the information up into a form that the rest of us who are not involved day to day can digest, like has been done here. Another example is the "This Week in Rust" newsletter which takes progress that would'…
Yeah, I feel like they have done an incredible job with that aspect of Rust.
Like, they _are_ making a lot of progress, but because of the amount of time spent on developing/informing the community and other non-implementation pieces it feels like a rocket ship rather than "just" a well executed project.
Re: Two years of Rust
#10I'm consistently blown away by just how good the project management for this language is. It's not just the forward progress that the language is making (which is considerable), but also just how well they package the information up into a form that the rest of us who are not involved day to day can digest, like has been done here. Another example is the "This Week in Rust" newsletter which takes progress that would'…
I'm still on dabbling in Rust, but I'm fairly convinced that in another few years after this Tokio churn has gotten a chance to settle down and the async patterns are more broadly refined, there won't be many justifiable reasons to not write new projects in it, whether they're as low level as a Postgres extension or as high level as a DB-backed HTTP application. Not being hindered by the compiler telling you what you…
> Not being hindered by the compiler telling you what you can and can't do; freeing yourself from the write-compile-debug cycle, reducing it to repl-done; etc.
Yeah, I certainly understand various language trade-offs, but in my experience any of these early wins of interpreted languages come back to haunt you at significant cost.
I saw someone use the analogy of a credit card on here before: purchases are very easy to make, but have to be repaid in full, and without perfect discipline you'll be paying interest on top. Now consider most development teams (who are generally strapped for resources) like middle-class earners who don't make quite enough to pay back that balance every month. It starts to accumulate, and the owed interest compounds.
Compilers can do a lot to ensure high productivity and a good user experience: (1) be fast, (2) have great error messages, and (3) be easy to use (no makefiles or heavy build systems). Rust's compiler has learnt from the mistakes of its predecessors in other languages, and does all these for you.