Why is Rust difficult? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#41

Post by bitL » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

hateduser2 wrote: post #36

bitL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a look once I am done learning another hot language ;-) Thanks!

So your issue isnt about rust, its about changing popularity and language trendiness?

Not at all; currently I am able to write non-trivial programs in >60 languages and ranging from low-level distributed transactions (did own Paxos already) through 3D visualizations, business software, mobile apps, Deep Learning models and AI, system software all the way to advanced ETL pipelines using imperative, functional, logical, co-routine-based, generics, reactive, declarative etc. concepts and am always on the lookout for a better language as I can't find the perfect one ;-) So I want to understand where Rust stands and if it is meaningful investment to learn it, both programming "pleasure"-wise and business sense-wise.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#42

Post by stmw » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

tatterdemalion wrote: post #16

stmw wrote: post #2

Good article, although there are also some unforced errors of what Rust community calls "ergonomics" - many of which have been addressed, and hopefully many others will be soon - that make things more difficult to learn than the absolutely have to be. But author is quite correct that some things are just hard, and if a language is being "honest", it must expose them to the user.

What we could do better than we do today - and your comment about ergonomics alludes to our work to improve this - is ease the onboarding of that complexity we have to be "honest" about. Its a design constraint of Rust that it must maximize user control, but that does not imply that users have to be faced with all of those choices as soon as they first try to write Rust. In some respects I think this article is an at…

Indeed, I used the term "ergonomics" specifically as such an allusion. But I am not sure I read the article as claiming that such efforts are "dishonest", I instead see it as a reference to some other languages and runtimes that run up technical debt for the sake of easy living in the short term.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#43

Post by sitkack » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25

eridius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it pretty strange to read you say "it costs static typing". Static typing is a feature . There's a reason people are starting to switch to TypeScript instead of JavaScript.

(ง'̀-'́)ง Static typing is useful in large codebases at big companies because it forces you to communicate your intentions clearly. It's also useful in large OSS projects because it allows your IDE to auto generate tooling and documentation. If someone is using TypeScript, it's far more likely the codebase will have clear, documented interfaces. But TypeScript is optional . It doesn't hold you down and yell at you un…

Sounds like you might like Lua+Rust or Scheme+Rust. Rust is still extremely young and all the first people to show up are by definition, the early, willingly converts. As it attracts more folks, it will get a wider spectrum of programmer and opinion. You could make an `Any` enum type and implement a ton of default traits for it, it might feel a little dynamic.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#44

Post by bitL » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

krapht wrote: post #33

One of these days I'll get around to Rust. I don't think it's fundamentally difficult, just different from most people's cowboy programming. I'm much more excited these days about program extraction from verified programs written in Idris or Coq, which is on a whole other level of pain and suffering.

Mind you even correctness checkers aren't panacea - they won't go all the way down to check if you are using IEEE 754 correctly and handle all possible edge cases and rather assume "well-defined math properties". And as Donald Knuth used to say: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#45

Post by microtonal » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:03 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25

eridius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it pretty strange to read you say "it costs static typing". Static typing is a feature . There's a reason people are starting to switch to TypeScript instead of JavaScript.

(ง'̀-'́)ง Static typing is useful in large codebases at big companies because it forces you to communicate your intentions clearly. It's also useful in large OSS projects because it allows your IDE to auto generate tooling and documentation. If someone is using TypeScript, it's far more likely the codebase will have clear, documented interfaces. But TypeScript is optional . It doesn't hold you down and yell at you un…

Static typing is useful in large codebases at big companies because it forces you to communicate your intentions clearly.

I disagree with the implication that static typing is not useful for small applications. Last week, I was writing a tiny GTK+ application (still In Rust, you can only send data of a type that implements Send to another thread and share data of a type that implements Sync. Since Send/Sync are not implemented for gtk-rs types, sending/sharing data to/with another thread is a compiler error. This was immensely helpful in writing a program that uses GTK+ in a safe way. One could say this as the compiler being annoying, but having lived through enough C++/Qt threading bugs, I would rather have the compiler bail out with a clear error than debugging these issues at runtime.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#46

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

eridius wrote: post #17

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14

Is there a way to avoid the true-believer syndrome for Rust? I want to embrace Rust, but everyone ~100% of the time comes away chanting about how awesome Rust is. So much so that it's a bit unsettling. Zealotry in general is bad, but especially in programming: once you identify as an X programmer, you lose out on ideas from Y and Z. Every tool has its flaws, but for whatever reason it seems extremely rare to discuss…

I find it pretty strange to read you say "it costs static typing". Static typing is a feature . There's a reason people are starting to switch to TypeScript instead of JavaScript.

> Static typing is a feature.

A feature is just an objective quality of a product that isn't contrary to the creators intent.

Features often have costs; but the desirable ones have benefits in some use that outweigh the costs in that use.

It's true that mandatory static typing with a sufficiently expressive type system is beneficial in some uses. It's also true that pure dynamic typing or optional static typing (of the mypy/Typescript sort) are. Now, obviously, the circumstances and users for which eachh is most are beneficial are different.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#47

Post by jacobush » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:06 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #37

I like Rust so far, but there's a few things I think aren't true: * That Rust is only harder because it enforces 'correctness.' It certainly is harder because it enforces correctness, but it's also harder because of how . I'm not saying there's a better approach to this, but I think a lot of people are implying that there isn't, and I don't think that's a safe assumption. I think that we could find ways to make equal…

I agree with everything, just wanted to nuance with a little thought - if cloning memory at every occasion makes the code safer and more correct but slower, that might be worth it. Always favor correct over broken. If you are coming from C to Rust in a domain that is actually better suited for Go... well at least you are arguably better off with Rust than C, right?

So I think that Rust will advance the overall state of the art, just a bit.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#48

Post by jacobush » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

bitL wrote: post #44

krapht wrote: post #33

One of these days I'll get around to Rust. I don't think it's fundamentally difficult, just different from most people's cowboy programming. I'm much more excited these days about program extraction from verified programs written in Idris or Coq, which is on a whole other level of pain and suffering.

Mind you even correctness checkers aren't panacea - they won't go all the way down to check if you are using IEEE 754 correctly and handle all possible edge cases and rather assume "well-defined math properties". And as Donald Knuth used to say: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Made me think, maybe they should check if you are using IEEE 754 correctly...

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#49

Post by jchw » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #47

jchw wrote: post #37

I like Rust so far, but there's a few things I think aren't true: * That Rust is only harder because it enforces 'correctness.' It certainly is harder because it enforces correctness, but it's also harder because of how . I'm not saying there's a better approach to this, but I think a lot of people are implying that there isn't, and I don't think that's a safe assumption. I think that we could find ways to make equal…

I agree with everything, just wanted to nuance with a little thought - if cloning memory at every occasion makes the code safer and more correct but slower, that might be worth it. Always favor correct over broken. If you are coming from C to Rust in a domain that is actually better suited for Go ... well at least you are arguably better off with Rust than C, right? So I think that Rust will advance the overall state…

Oh yes, as long as the anti-patterns that emerge don't cause other bugs, they're OK; but some may lead to logical bugs. I'm not sure how likely that is, though- not enough history to go off of yet.

Rust is certainly a step in the right direction. I hope the toolchain and so forth end up in a state where all forms of users can love it, though; I have seem some reasonable opposition to including Rust in kernel code, and that sucks.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#50

Post by Animats » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

Rust's problem is not correctness. The borrow checker is the good part of the language. It's feeping creaturism. The language started out as imperative, and then became semi-functional. It started out as thread-oriented, and now is acquiring "green threads"/coroutines/cooperative multitasking. The generics system and library started where C++ and Boost left off. The "trait" system was more "objects bad, must do something else" than an improved idea.

The Go guys knew when to stop. The Rust guys don't.