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Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

jonathanturner.org

121–130 of 136 posts

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#121
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check your hangups at the door man. I love being a gopher and a rustacean. I like being cute and having a cute name for myself and fellow community members. It's attitudes like this that created the massive gender divide in CS and it needs to end.

On the (very cold) ride into work this morning I realized my mistake. I did not mean to say that being cute needs to go away. If you want to have a teddybear on your desk called Mr. Snuggles, that doesn't bother me in the least. What bothers me is cutesy labels like what we're talking about here. They're so commonly used in a manipulative manner that I have trouble seeing them as anything other than scary. I don't li…

Can you provide examples of this manipulative manner in which they are used? I'm having a hard time understanding your justification.

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#122
post #75

Rustaceans? Would recruiting agencies go for that in job ads? "Are you a top rustacean and looking for a challenge in AI and Big Data and want to work in an international team with young and dynamic rustaceans? "

Is "Rust" a positive-sounding name in the first place ? It's old, decaying metal. It's like saying your favorite image editor is Gimp. It is a fine piece of software, but sounds unprofessional for native English speakers.

If someone forked GIMP, put in nicer UI styling, and gave it a more friendly name, I'm sure its adoption would be much higher...

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might look at LuaJIT as that language, with the inner loop in Rust.

It's very easy to do the Java/C, C#/C, C#/Rust, Python/C dance, but there is always a massive impedance mismatch at the boundary, and there are always two different build systems and package managers etc involved. I'd like to see a language that is both systems and high level at the same time, with trivial interop and a common build system + package manager. This could e.g be a set of low level extensions added to C#…

Totally agree. The thing with LuaJIT or more appropriately stock Lua is that the VM is small enough to include in your project directly. If Vec and String were exposed to Lua first class construct, we would be a long way there.

The two most mature, well-designed languages in the Rust world are Gluon [1] and Dyon [2]

I believe there is a _great_ opportunity for something like Terra [3] but woven into Rust. Perhaps with the same type of compiler plugin that enabled HolyJIT [4]

The grail is having both a GC and an ownership based gc-free lower level all in the same language. Start dynamic, harden to static and sprinkle in properties.

As a side note, I have been thinking about how to bolt ownership onto a dynamic language and then I learned about Snowflake [5]. I think it would be totally doable to bolt ownership onto Java using annotations and AoT subsets of a program, completely escaping the garbage collector. This would be like Terra++

[1] https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon

[2] https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon

[3] http://terralang.org/

[4] https://github.com/nbp/holyjit

[5] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/project...

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#124
post #108

And yet not a single project written in Rust is out. The only project is Servo and nowhere close to production.

If you have a recent version of Firefox installed, you have Rust code running in production on your computer. Along with the dozens of other companies who are now using Rust.

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#125
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] but it's really hard to justify to myself the pain of writing correct Rust code (borrowing, lifetimes, etc.) when I know I can get almost the same effect by using a GC language + immutable messages. > And I don't need that last drop of performance either. You probably write more highlevel code? Rust is --as the name implies-- most suited for close-to-the-metal code. This is often where that "last drop of perf…

> Rust is --as the name implies-- most suited for close-to-the-metal code. There are a lot of projects that really could be written in a high-level language, but they were started when C was still preferable due to the immaturity of higher-level solutions. I think it is sad that people, looking at these aging and unaudited C codebases, are thinking about rewriting them in Rust, when rewriting them in e.g. Python migh…

> I think it is sad that people, looking at these aging and unaudited C codebases, are thinking about rewriting them in Rust, when rewriting them in e.g. Python might make better sense.

I agree... apart from the Python bit. :) When deving software that is very big (LOC) or very widely distributed (FLOSS packages), then I prefer "well typed" languages that do not need a VM/interpreter.

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to do the Java/C, C#/C, C#/Rust, Python/C dance, but there is always a massive impedance mismatch at the boundary, and there are always two different build systems and package managers etc involved. I'd like to see a language that is both systems and high level at the same time, with trivial interop and a common build system + package manager. This could e.g be a set of low level extensions added to C#…

Totally agree. The thing with LuaJIT or more appropriately stock Lua is that the VM is small enough to include in your project directly. If Vec and String were exposed to Lua first class construct, we would be a long way there. The two most mature, well-designed languages in the Rust world are Gluon [1] and Dyon [2] I believe there is a _great_ opportunity for something like Terra [3] but woven into Rust. Perhaps wit…

There is also a Lisp dialect: https://github.com/murarth/ketos

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#129
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] but it's really hard to justify to myself the pain of writing correct Rust code (borrowing, lifetimes, etc.) when I know I can get almost the same effect by using a GC language + immutable messages. > And I don't need that last drop of performance either. You probably write more highlevel code? Rust is --as the name implies-- most suited for close-to-the-metal code. This is often where that "last drop of perf…

> Rust is --as the name implies-- most suited for close-to-the-metal code. There are a lot of projects that really could be written in a high-level language, but they were started when C was still preferable due to the immaturity of higher-level solutions. I think it is sad that people, looking at these aging and unaudited C codebases, are thinking about rewriting them in Rust, when rewriting them in e.g. Python migh…

But Rust is linker compatible with C and C++, meaning the typesafe rewrites can also be shoehorned into Python, just like its native extensions in C are...

Re: Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

#130
post #28

You have to take all this with a mountain of salt. Boosterism is the norm in our space, sadly. If one devotes time to learning a technology it is personally advantageous if that technology takes off. Hence you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into" stuff. And the worse, yet related utter rubbish we see all the time.…

It's a list of facts. You don't need a "mountain of salt" to take a list of simple, easy to check facts. > you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into" It doesn't say how wonderful Rust is, it says how many contributions it had, how many users on gitter, etc. You can interpret that like you want, but that's just your…

It doesn't say how wonderful Rust is

Except that's exactly what it's trying to say.

It's a list of facts.

Let's take one:

"In the last ~3 months, 36 RFCs were merged."

What does that even mean? How does that relate Rust to any other language? Do I really have to do all the homework on what an 'RFC' really is in this context, whether 36 is a lot, and if 3 months is fast? Sure, it's a 'fact', but it's a fact devoid of context tossed out with a giant pile of similarly context-free facts. In order to make Rust seem like it's wonderful. To people who evaluate such things uncritically. Congrats if that's what you want to attract.

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