211–220 of 323 posts
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…
The problem with Rust is that it is very hard to program interconnected graphs. Basic Rust does not allow cyclic references, which means that almost every graph needs to use special tricks to make it work. These tricks are variants of reference counting. A trick that was copied directly from C++. It feels like having to build a car with only a screwdriver and hammer. Each section of your graph needs to be managed sep…
The easiest way to build graphs in Rust is to store all your graph nodes in a Vec, and use indices instead of references to refer to other nodes. Also a cache locality win.
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if something is hard to do in Rust it's probably an anti-pattern with respect to memory performance or safety. Oh? Tell me, how many lines of Rust does this take you? struct Task { struct Task *next; struct Task *prev; struct TaskRegs regs; //other shit here } Or are doubly-linked lists antipatterns now?
struct Task { next: *mut Task, prev: *mut Task, regs: TaskRegs, // other shit here } is the direct translation. > Or are doubly-linked lists antipatterns now? They're often not what you want, yes. But if you are in that situation, in the worst case you're in the same place as C, and you can write the Rust the same way if you'd like.
The problem with Rust is that it is very hard to program interconnected graphs. Basic Rust does not allow cyclic references, which means that almost every graph needs to use special tricks to make it work. These tricks are variants of reference counting. A trick that was copied directly from C++. It feels like having to build a car with only a screwdriver and hammer. Each section of your graph needs to be managed sep…
To be clear, cyclic references are just as much an issue in GCed languages. In Python I had to use weakref lib to ensure cyclically referenced objects are still GCed. Rust is the same in that aspect, you use the Rc builtin type and create a weakref for one of them.
> universally terrible documentation Wait, what? Rust has what I consider the best documentation I've seen of any language. The docs explain things at a high-level, but concisely, and have numerous examples. The formatting is good, the keyboard navigation support is good, it's well-linked, and it has convenient features like links to the source and the ability to collapse everything but method headers for easier brow…
(Author here.) I wrote this piece hastily, and it really wasn't intended for this broad of an audience — I won't redact the existing wording I still think it's roughly right, but I do regret a lot of it. Rust's docs are amazing in certain contexts — the book is great, the built-in support for documentation on types/functions/etc. is amazing, and compiling code examples are a very laudable idea. What I'm speaking to h…
I take documentation bugs seriously. If you did this with any of my crates, please file bugs. My guess is that other crate authors might feel the same, and that they would also appreciate bug reports.
Writing good docs is super hard, because in order to do it well, one must sink themselves entirely into the perspective of someone who is seeking answers. This is hard when you already have the answers.
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struct Task { next: *mut Task, prev: *mut Task, regs: TaskRegs, // other shit here } is the direct translation. > Or are doubly-linked lists antipatterns now? They're often not what you want, yes. But if you are in that situation, in the worst case you're in the same place as C, and you can write the Rust the same way if you'd like.
Doubly linked lists are impossible in safe rust by definition since the only safe way to modify a memory location is via a &mut reference. And Rust guarantees that that any memory location can only be pointed to by only one &mut reference. A doubly linked list by definition has two pointers pointing to each node, so no, your example will not work.
It's the direct translation of your C, which is why I mentioned that specifically.
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.
Prototyping and editing code makes for most of my work, and Rust makes that a chore. That’s my main gripe with the language. It’s more like moving through molasses than encountering a brick wall.
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If we'd all start programming in stable, mature languages instead of letting peer pressure goad us into using betaware and worse, work would be a lot simpler. It would also encourage organizations large and small to start releasing complete, polished products instead of the "move fast and break things" crap that has infected the industry. Imagine if car makers worked the same way.
By that logic, programs written in C are the most polished. Yeah, that checks out. /s
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.
Writing Rust code isn’t that hard, sure. The annoyences start when you try modifying code or moving things around. Prototyping and editing code makes for most of my work, and Rust makes that a chore. That’s my main gripe with the language. It’s more like moving through molasses than encountering a brick wall.
I'm obviously about as far from the modal Rust user as one can get, but at this point the language has completely melted away into the background. I'm often tempted to write smallish scripts in dynamic languages, but even for those I frequently choose Rust just for the Cargo ecosystem. In particular I never see a reason to use C++ unless I'm contributing to a codebase that's written in it. It takes different programm…