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Two years of Rust

blog.rust-lang.org

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Re: Two years of Rust

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. It just isn't safe. The extra primitives for safer handling of pointers are main advantage of C++, D, Rust, etc. A worthwhile re-incarnagion of Modula-3 should have something similar.

So the standard library doesn't rely on GC semantics anywhere? As I recall, that's the main problem with D: the standard library basically requires GC. Your code might not require it, but the library is always there. On top of that, it's just too easy to accidentally involve GC by using reference types.

Actually, I dont know. Good question. I tried to quickly get the info but all I found was about I/O. It's done UNSAFE to use platform-specific ways of reducing overhead. Probably no GC semantics there. Anyone curious who can get some Modula-3 source for stdlib might just look to see if UNSAFE is at the top of the routines. Also, if that turns off the GC, Id reason that just putting it in front of a stdlib function that was GC'd might make it work without it unless they screwed up memory management in the code itself.

Re: Two years of Rust

#312
post #43

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…

As a Python dev with 12 years of experience, I still use the REPL every day.

When I wonder how something works or if I need my memory to be refreshed, I just fire up jupyter console and test quickly the code. I don't open the doc or search on the net. I have the live result immediatly.

When I want to debug my web server, I drop a REPL in the server and play with the code. It's more efficient that just debugging, because I can actually modify the code live and see what happens.

When I need to understand a format and how to manipulate / tranform data, I use the REPL (or jupyter notebook) because it's the most natural way to do it.

I don't know how much Python you have done, but you have been missing one of the greatest tool of the ecosystem.

It's like saying you don't see that much the benefits of an IDE for refactoring in Java. "yeah it's cool but how much do you use it hu ?".

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