Why is Rust difficult? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#151

Post by neverartful » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #123

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…

As an occasional Ada programmer, I've taken a look several times at Rust and have decided to skip it every time. Ada might be a pain in the ass sometimes (alias rules...), but it's way easier than Rust. In my opinion Rust is a classical case of technology that gets into humans' way rather than serving humans. For me it's just not worth the hassle, especially since most of my programs do not require any soft realtime…

I've taken a brief look at Ada several times, but gave up on it because it seemed difficult to get a cohesive set of documentation and examples (and ideally a good book) that were all in sync. Since Ada has been around for so long, there's an awful lot of outdated material. Do you have any suggestions on materials one should use while learning Ada for hobbyist purposes? I'd like to give it another go.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#152

Post by mikojan » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #76

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…

> Go is another programming language I like, ... Fearless concurrency is a wonderful feature, but for embarrassingly parallel problems Go works wonderfully. I adore Go's concurrency model but loathe go's actual language. The constant repetition in error handling, lack of generics and lack of parameterised types and Option make it feel like a children's toy set version of C instead of a useful modern language akin to…

Kotlin has coroutines, channels and select.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#153

Post by imtringued » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #43

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Luajit with it's ffi library for zero overhead ffi is amazing.

Even if you don't use Rust you can increase performance and reduce memory usage massively by simply defining the memory layout for your existing lua code.

http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html#cdata

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#154

Post by lmm » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #147

lmm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're working in a GCed language you assume your language's GC is responsible for freeing memory. When you interoperate with a language where owners are responsible for freeing memory, you have to have a way to "disown" structures you've created but passed into the ownership language (e.g. a callback you've passed to a library function) so that your GC doesn't free them, and a way to "own" structures you've rec…

Well, declaring untraced references in Modula-3 or Active Oberon, or doing native heap allocations in Nim, D, Java and C# is relatively simple. Using GC languages doesn't mean doing 100% memory allocation via GC.

I've done it in Java; it's not officially supported in the language standard (or has only recently been added if so - certainly they were talking about it for years), and the wider language does not generally have the support or idioms you would want (e.g. try-with-resources was only introduced a couple of versions ago), libraries aren't oriented towards that style.... It's certainly doable but I'd stand by it not being easy or natural.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#155

Post by segmondy » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #123

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…

As an occasional Ada programmer, I've taken a look several times at Rust and have decided to skip it every time. Ada might be a pain in the ass sometimes (alias rules...), but it's way easier than Rust. In my opinion Rust is a classical case of technology that gets into humans' way rather than serving humans. For me it's just not worth the hassle, especially since most of my programs do not require any soft realtime…

I feel exactly the same. It's so strange seeing everyone screaming about safety, yet they never gave Ada a try.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#156

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:07 PM 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…

> but I would normally define 'correctness' to include rigorous mathematical proofs

Well, Rust does push for strong algebraic types. They aren't as expressive as other languages (the lack of higher order types irks me all the time - no, hygienic macros are not a good alternative) but they are the best ones you will find on any bare-metal language.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#157

Post by quodlibetor » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #76

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…

> Go is another programming language I like, ... Fearless concurrency is a wonderful feature, but for embarrassingly parallel problems Go works wonderfully. I adore Go's concurrency model but loathe go's actual language. The constant repetition in error handling, lack of generics and lack of parameterised types and Option make it feel like a children's toy set version of C instead of a useful modern language akin to…

The nice thing about Rust not having Async IO built into the language is that arbitrary third-party implementations are possible on a level playing field with the async framework being developed by the core team.

For example, there is the May[1] concurrency library. It provides alternative implementations of the standard library's IO interface, but does Go's automatic suspend/resume, so it still looks like blocking code, which is nice. From what I can tell it's still early days on a one-person project, but it is interesting, at least.

[1]: https://blog.zhpass.com/2017/12/23/may-announcement/

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#158

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #81

(for newcomers) nothing works out of the box or as expected program[0]="+"; | ^^^^^^^^^^ the type `str` cannot be mutably indexed by `{integer}` error: use of unstable library feature 'collections': needs investigation to see if to_string() can match perf error: borrowed value does not live long enough reference must be valid for the block suffix following statement 0 When you use an index operator ([]) you get the a…

Ouch. I still couldn't wrap my mind to that string traversing gets intuitive in Rust. The entire iterator thing seems completely counter-intuitive.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#159

Post by mamcx » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #128

jonathanstrange wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an occasional Ada programmer, I've taken a look several times at Rust and have decided to skip it every time. Ada might be a pain in the ass sometimes (alias rules...), but it's way easier than Rust. In my opinion Rust is a classical case of technology that gets into humans' way rather than serving humans. For me it's just not worth the hassle, especially since most of my programs do not require any soft realtime…

Second the Ada note. That language is so well constructed and thought out on many levels. ...except the outer, most superficial level. I'm genuinely afraid that it will never "catch on" because it just looks weird. (But not weird enough to attract that kind of people.) It's a shame because - Ada generic packages are exactly what C++ templates should have been - Derived types and record extension is inheritance that m…

I have done pascal before and I wish to have ADA more easily available.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#160

Post by pornel » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #81

(for newcomers) nothing works out of the box or as expected program[0]="+"; | ^^^^^^^^^^ the type `str` cannot be mutably indexed by `{integer}` error: use of unstable library feature 'collections': needs investigation to see if to_string() can match perf error: borrowed value does not live long enough reference must be valid for the block suffix following statement 0 When you use an index operator ([]) you get the a…

Rust is especially difficult if you bring your C-like assumptions to it.

You first need to learn difference between a borrow (a view, which may be read-only) and owned type, and know that Rust enforces stdlib strings to be UTF-8. Random mutation of a byte in a string is possible, but it has been deliberately put behind an unsafe function call, and there are better alternatives available (like char iterators).

It's not hard once you "get" the way Rust works with data.