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Two years of Rust

blog.rust-lang.org

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Re: Two years of Rust

#41

Post by nickpsecurity »

kibwen wrote: post #28
nickpsecurity wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Modula-3 Evangelism Strike Force! We meet again! :)

Oh yeah, I forgot to ask "Have you or the others considered rewriting your compiler in Modula-3? I hear you get safety, acceptable speed, and 5x iteration speed of Rust."

Re: Two years of Rust

#42

Post by comex »

brandur wrote: post #10
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Rust's compiler is not fast. At best it can beat C++ compilers - C++ being a language whose build times people love to bemoan - but usually it does far worse. This might change once rustc eventually gets proper incremental compilation (not the codegen-only thing that's currently in beta). Hopefully. Rust doesn't use header files, so in theory it should be possible to leapfrog C++ (at least until C++ gets modules standardized), but for now that's just theory.

Right now, I don't do much serious work in Rust, almost solely because of compilation speed.

Re: Two years of Rust

#43

Post by zzalpha »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #40
brandur wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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. If you understood the wins of untyped languages, you'd be aware that this is often the most optimal path for a startup to take. Get features done now + fix them later is, in hundreds of cases, the way that startups win. It's also a win for people w…

If your language doesn't have a REPL, your language is less productive. Deal with it.

Oh hardly.

As someone who's developed software in Perl, Python, C, Java, C#, Haskell, and a few others besides, a REPL is the one thing I use the least. I've honestly never understood the obsession with it.

Is a rapid compile-run-debug cycle important? Absolutely. If I want to test something in isolation, being able to rapidly turn out a UT to prove my code does what I think it does is incredibly important.

But a REPL is a nice-to-have. Nothing more. Treating its absence as some fundamental black mark on a language is completely absurd.

Re: Two years of Rust

#46

Post by Terribledactyl »

mmstick wrote: post #45

You might like to know that I've had great success with full stack web development using Rust. My website ( https://mmstick.tk ) is hosted with the Rocket ( https://rocket.rs/overview/ ) web framework and operates as a fully static binary with 100% Rust code. I've even got HTTPS and Brotli compression.

I'm having a bit of an issue with your site in Safari. 10.12.4 sierra, extensions turned off. https://s2.postimg.org/4t8v7lqdl/Screen_Shot_2017-05-15_at_1...

Re: Two years of Rust

#47

Post by eridius »

brandur wrote: post #38
ben_jones wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion what are some of the things wrong with Rust? Genuinely curious as someone who operates at the higher level of the stack (web development) but is interested in learning something lower: C++, Rust, etc.

> In your opinion what are some of the things wrong with Rust? Genuinely curious as someone who operates at the higher level of the stack (web development) but is interested in learning something lower: C++, Rust, etc. I think the most classically cited problem is the learning curve. Understanding ownership and lifetimes, and understanding how to satisfy the borrow checker can be quite daunting. Here are a few that I…

Rust used to have a light runtime that managed asynchronous operations using green threads. It was eventually discarded because it caused an unavoidable performance hit even when not using it (because the low-level runtime and I/O methods all needed virtual dispatch) and it wasn't providing any clear benefit over just using OS threads.

Re: Two years of Rust

#48

Post by lilyball »

mmstick wrote: post #45

You might like to know that I've had great success with full stack web development using Rust. My website ( https://mmstick.tk ) is hosted with the Rocket ( https://rocket.rs/overview/ ) web framework and operates as a fully static binary with 100% Rust code. I've even got HTTPS and Brotli compression.

Your site is returning brotli-encoded data even when the browser doesn't support it. At least, I assume that's what it's doing, because the return value is complete garbage and it contains a "Content-Encoding: br" header.

Re: Two years of Rust

#49

Post by sillysaurus3 »

zzalpha wrote: post #43
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. If you understood the wins of untyped languages, you'd be aware that this is often the most optimal path for a startup to take. Get features done now + fix them later is, in hundreds of cases, the way that startups win. It's also a win for people w…

If your language doesn't have a REPL, your language is less productive. Deal with it. Oh hardly. As someone who's developed software in Perl, Python, C, Java, C#, Haskell, and a few others besides, a REPL is the one thing I use the least . I've honestly never understood the obsession with it. Is a rapid compile-run-debug cycle important? Absolutely. If I want to test something in isolation, being able to rapidly turn…

I tend to agree, but being able to have a REPL at all is a symptom that your language is capable of an extremely fast compile-run-debug cycle.

In other words, if you can't implement a REPL, that's the definition of "less productive language." It's not about the REPL itself but the capability of implementing one.

Think about it like this: On your list of languages, which of them would you say is most productive? It depends on the context, certainly: libraries, familiarity, etc. But let's assume the languages had identical ecosystems, and that you were competent in all of them. Which of them would take the smallest amount of time to write your feature?

That'd probably be Python, Haskell, or even Perl. It seems very difficult to argue that Rust would top them. And the reasons why this is might be true are worth examining.

Here's another aspect. Is the Rust community claiming that the entire history of computing has lead up to this point, where Rust exists, and now nobody needs to write anything in not-Rust? Are people 200 years from now going to write Rust and nothing else? How about 20? 2?

It becomes very difficult to argue that your programming language is the lingua franca of the future. (And that's probably true for every language, not just Rust.)

Re: Two years of Rust

#50

Post by mmstick »

Terribledactyl wrote: post #46
mmstick wrote: post #45

You might like to know that I've had great success with full stack web development using Rust. My website ( https://mmstick.tk ) is hosted with the Rocket ( https://rocket.rs/overview/ ) web framework and operates as a fully static binary with 100% Rust code. I've even got HTTPS and Brotli compression.

I'm having a bit of an issue with your site in Safari. 10.12.4 sierra, extensions turned off. https://s2.postimg.org/4t8v7lqdl/Screen_Shot_2017-05-15_at_1...

You need a web browser that supports Brotli compression -- the standard compression algorithm for HTTPS. Safari does not support it, but everyone else does. Even Edge. http://caniuse.com/#feat=brotli
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