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100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

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Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#61

Post by SCdF »

physguy1123 wrote: post #51
SCdF wrote: post #38

I am currently learning Rust and I feel this intensely[1]. I really want to like Rust, but I feel like the way they cope with no GC (lifetimes, borrowing) fights me at every turn, and really simple situations in other languages[2] become these intensely painful situations. Every time you think you've worked out how to fix a problem you find while you've fixed that one you've actually created 2 more. Want to have a da…

There's nothing at all preventing you from having a Vec in a struct, and the use cases for variable sized structs are pretty rare. It sounds more like you conflated having a different problem with having a Vec be in a struct and stuff like that poisoned your further attempts to understand the language

You're absolutely right. What I really meant was that you can't have Vec where T is a trait without also wrapping that in a box, which for me in turn doesn't work for a bunch of other reasons.

In any case, my point remains the same: it is very challenging-- at least for someone used to just creating data structures and letting GC handle it-- to build code that does what you want, and you spend large amounts of time "fighting" the compiler. I am OK if people wish to peg that on me being stupid or whatever, it doesn't change the core point: it's hard for new people to get into, and if you're wanting there to be less Electron apps and more native apps things like Rust being easy to use seems important for that.

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#62

Post by valw »

This sort of feedback would much more helpful and credible if you added what sort of project you're using Rust on, your technical background, and concrete facts (not just metaphorical opinions / complaints) about what goes wrong. As it is, this article helps no one make informed technology decisions. See https://vimeo.com/9270320.

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#65

Post by weberc2 »

b0rsuk wrote: post #19
vvanders wrote: post #11

I was following along until this: > universally terrible documentation and lacking examples, unstable APIs, type annotation hell, and so much more. The docs in Rust are by far some of the best I've seen, without specifics it's really hard to understand what issues he hit.

They're completely different kind of docs that Python's. Python's are written by hand, with many examples and tips how to use the various tools. Rust's documentation very much feels generated, and the last time I checked methods were not grouped. So vast portions of a page are consumed by variants of methods (overloaded methods?) which work exactly the same except they take different argument type. Python documentati…

They problem isn't that they're auto-generated, but that they're poorly organized or displayed (not sure exactly; hard to put my finger on). Everything on godoc.org (e.g., https://godoc.org/github.com/weberc2/httpeasy) is autogenerated and the readability is top notch.

By contrast, Python (which is my day-job language) is a hot mess. Usually everything is on one page, and it's often unclear which class's `__str__` method documentation you're looking at. SQLAlchemy's docs are absolutely awful in this regard. Further, links between things are poor and inconsistent (precisely because they're not autogenerated), and the dynamic nature of the language means its up to the documentation author to be explicit about the expectations (this is less a problem for well-formed functions, but for things like Pandas where every function takes a dozen combinations of arguments, it's a nightmare).

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#66

Post by arghwhat »

seawlf wrote: post #10

As someone who has been programming in Rust for nearly a year, even for commercial purposes, this article is baffling to me. I've found the compiler messages to be succinct and helpful. The package system is wonderful. It's dead easy to get something off the ground quickly. All it took was learning how and when to borrow.

I recently wrote a few projects in Rust (C/C++/Go/JavaScript/Java/Python as background), and very much like the language. My 2 cents from my endeavors with Rust

I felt like all type errors are backwards. That is, "got" was the target you are giving your type to, not the type that you are passing. This may only happen in some cases, but I just started tuning the content of those errors out and instead adjusted randomly until things worked or the message changed.

I was often getting obscure type errors that were not at all related to the issue, and sometimes the compiler just insisted that just one more burrow would do, no matter how many burrows you stack on. This is definitely because I did stupid things, but the compiler messages were only making matters worse.

String vs. str is a pain in the arse. My code was littered with .as_str() and .to_string(). I never had the right one.

Enums are super nice, but it's very annoying that you cannot just use the value as a type. My project had a lot of enums (user-provided query trees), and it was causing a lot of friction.

There are also many trivial tasks where you think "Of course there is an established ecosystem of libraries and frameworks for this", and end up proven wrong. I mostly did find one library for the thing I needed, but often immature. The HTTP server + DB game seems especially poor.

In the end, I had to quit the fun and get work done (and others did not find playing with new tools as fun as I did), so I ported the project to Go and got productive. I took a fraction of the time to write in Go, the libraries are just so much more mature, it performs significantly better than the Rust implementation (probably because of better libraries—definitely not stating that Go is faster than Rust here), compile takes 1 (one) second rather than minnutes, and there is in general just much less friction.

On the flipside, it takes about 2-3 times as much Go than Rust to do the same task, even if it was way easier to write the Go code. The code is also a lot uglier. As an especially bad case, something that was a serde macro call in the Rust version is 150 lines of manually walking maps in the Go version.

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#67

Post by weberc2 »

tzahola wrote: post #64
brabel wrote: post #48

Exactly my feelings. Interesting how some people claim a rather different experience. Rust was voted the most loved technology on StackOverflow, which is unbelievable to me.

It was probably done by the Rust Evangelism Strike Force.

I don't think so. Rust is a brilliant language in theory, and for many high-performance applications. There's a lot to love from afar. But it still hasn't made good on its promises to be a great language for everyday application development. That said, the goal is lofty and laudable and the community's positive attitude and ability to take constructive criticism are world class.

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#68

Post by scrumper »

SCdF wrote: post #38

I am currently learning Rust and I feel this intensely[1]. I really want to like Rust, but I feel like the way they cope with no GC (lifetimes, borrowing) fights me at every turn, and really simple situations in other languages[2] become these intensely painful situations. Every time you think you've worked out how to fix a problem you find while you've fixed that one you've actually created 2 more. Want to have a da…

Minor point: you can have Vectors in structs. Vector is a fixed-size type on the stack so it works fine. And other types in structs too. EDIT: sorry, I see you got to that before I'd finished this post :)

Rust is a language where you have to kind of take a step back before working with it to read about the design tradeoffs and why they were made. Certain things you're used to doing with other languages just won't work (e.g. doubly linked lists), and trying to coerce the language into being something it's not leads to you going on one of those frustrating circular rabbit hole journeys you described so nicely above, usually ending up with laptop defenestration.

I'm a week into Rust. I find like you the compiler quite helpful, the docs comprehensive but a bit impenetrable, and the ownership & lifetime system logical on its own terms but very, very unnatural to learn. I don't actually know if its worth it yet.

I am really, really enjoying the O'Reilly Rust book ("Programming Rust"). Maybe sign up for a 10 day Safari trial (free, no card) and give the first few chapters a read. It may help reset you.

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#69

Post by gnode »

SCdF wrote: post #38

I am currently learning Rust and I feel this intensely[1]. I really want to like Rust, but I feel like the way they cope with no GC (lifetimes, borrowing) fights me at every turn, and really simple situations in other languages[2] become these intensely painful situations. Every time you think you've worked out how to fix a problem you find while you've fixed that one you've actually created 2 more. Want to have a da…

An example of a variable size Vec in a struct:

My understanding is that technically the Vec object itself is fixed size under the hood (a pointer and size field), but as far as I can tell, this is what you're after. It needs no references or boxes.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=8d88b83daa2f389892bfa95c8db...

  extern crate rand;
  
  use rand::Rng;
  
  #[derive(Debug)]
  struct MyStruct {
      v: Vec
  }
  
  impl MyStruct {
      pub fn new() -> MyStruct {
          let mut rng = rand::thread_rng();
          let n = rng.gen_range( 4, 10 );
          MyStruct {
              v: rng.gen_iter().take( n ).collect()
          }
      }
  }
  
  fn main() {
      let ms = MyStruct::new();
      
      println!( "{:?}", ms );
  }

Re: 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls

#70

Post by uvtc »

wmonk wrote: post #41
b0rsuk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're completely different kind of docs that Python's. Python's are written by hand, with many examples and tips how to use the various tools. Rust's documentation very much feels generated, and the last time I checked methods were not grouped. So vast portions of a page are consumed by variants of methods (overloaded methods?) which work exactly the same except they take different argument type. Python documentati…

Coming from well established js libs to python I have found the documentation really hard to deal with. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I really like getting to a repo on github and having the docs in the readme. Both python and rust have their own language specific doc implementations ReadTheDocs and docs.rs (I think). And you usually have to go to a separate site to view them which is fine, but I really dislike…

I think the problem is that the Python docs often put the examples at the end, when they should be right at the top.
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