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Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

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Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#11

Post by 0xCMP »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponents. This week I wrote a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk. I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things.…

For tasks like that I'm not sure why you should restrict yourself to no GC and no runtime. As Rust develops more libraries and advanced macros in those libraries you should be able to get more done quickly, but I'd think Go would be a good choice for the above task if you wanted the script to compile and deal with tons of data. Otherwise I believe Python really is the best choice here for both being very expressive and having libraries written to do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Which kind of makes me wonder if a language like the one you wished for existed would it not be better to pick one of the existing languages instead and maybe use type annotations to help in Node or Python?

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#12

Post by weberc2 »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponents. This week I wrote a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk. I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things.…

> This week I wrote a little script

I think a lot of proponents might argue that Python is better than Rust for very, very small scripts like this, but as your program grows, Rust pays its dividends quickly. This hasn't been my experience with Rust in my 4 years with it; it makes certain classes of errors harder, but I've not yet gotten to the point where the compiler is actually saving me time--the time I spend pacifying rustc is more than enough to write it in Go (or even Python) and get my extra confidence from tests. I like the idea of Rust, but it's hard for me to justify it for the applications I tend to write.

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#13

Post by vvanders »

weberc2 wrote: post #7
vvanders wrote: post #4

Very much matches my experience with the last ~2.5 years of Rust. One of the really eye-opening ones for me was building a UI library on win32 and watching it just work on Linux, OSX, Android and WASM(with some Canvas work). Obviously each platform took some work to build out their respective rendering primitives but the core engine(including embedding Lua via gcc crate) just worked. As someone who's done x-platform…

I have the same experiences with Go regarding xplat. I was particularly amazed that I could trivially cross compile by simply setting the GOOS and GOARCH env vars to the correct operating system and CPU architecture and then running `go build`. EDIT: Curious why people are downvoting this. Is it really so taboo to suggest that Go could be nearly as pleasant as Rust at something? Do I really need to roll out my Rust f…

https://crates.io/crates/gcc is even more amazing, it will cross-compile your C dependencies(assuming you have the right compilers setup, which is mostly handled already via rustup or base install).

For Android all I had to do was point it to the NDK(for both Rust and the crate) and I got all my C dependencies for basically free. Anyone who's had to work with the NDK knows how nice that is. That's also with zero changes to my build script/code/ifdefs/whatever.

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#14

Post by urschrei »

csomar wrote: post #6

This is indeed very light in content. Also, while Rust fixes a whole set of problems, it doesn't mean that Rust fixes all possible problems. It is relatively easy to create a situation where you overflow your program. See here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/50049 Googling around, there are many situations where bad code can lead to an overflow and your code breaking.

Who, ever, anywhere, has claimed that "Rust fixes all possible problems"? This is a straw man. As for bad code leading to overflows and crashes: yes, bad code causes overflows and crashes, definitionally. Rust does not, and has never claimed to protect against logic errors in this way. How could it?

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#15

Post by red75prime »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponents. This week I wrote a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk. I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things.…

Replace references with Rc's and you'll get a (slightly) slower version with no mental overhead of borrows.

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#16

Post by edflsafoiewq »

urschrei wrote: post #14
csomar wrote: post #6

This is indeed very light in content. Also, while Rust fixes a whole set of problems, it doesn't mean that Rust fixes all possible problems. It is relatively easy to create a situation where you overflow your program. See here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/50049 Googling around, there are many situations where bad code can lead to an overflow and your code breaking.

Who, ever, anywhere, has claimed that "Rust fixes all possible problems"? This is a straw man. As for bad code leading to overflows and crashes: yes, bad code causes overflows and crashes, definitionally. Rust does not, and has never claimed to protect against logic errors in this way. How could it?

The language in the article is very strong.

> Rust is another step into the beyond. When finishing a feature and its test suite I’ll run my program to see it in action, but just as a formality – I already know it works. I also know that it’s going to keep working because meticulousness of the compiler is so good at catching regressions.

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#18

Post by lmm »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #8
IshKebab wrote: post #5

I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponents. This week I wrote a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk. I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things.…

> I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things. That doesn't surprise me at all. Writing it in C++ would probably take me a lot longer than writing it in Python too.

Why is that the comparison point though? How long would it have taken in, say, OCaml or Haskell, which would have given similar correctness guarantees to Rust?

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#19

Post by majewsky »

IshKebab wrote: post #5

I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponents. This week I wrote a little script to read an XML file, get a path from it, read a file at that location, do some regexes on it, and then update the XML and write it back to disk. I'd estimate it took me about 10 times longer to implement in Rust than Python. And I don't exactly know Python well - it wasn't just extra time Googling how to do things.…

> I do think the difficulty of Rust is brushed aside by its proponent.

Then how do you explain the constant push for "more ergonomics"?

Re: Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

#20

Post by guelo »

I have a hard time believing that Rust's guarantees make it safer than easier statically typed languages like Java or Go. Rust is hard because it is solving a different problem, memory management without a garbage collector, not because it has the strongest correctness guarantees.
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