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Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

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Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#71

Post by hyperpallium »

ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

> "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?"

Didn't ocaml already answer that question? Since ocaml hasn't dominated, it seems something more is required... What has rust got beyond that?

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#72

Post by ilovecaching »

user111233 wrote: post #63
ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

I had a play with rust at the start of the year while I was evaluating if it would be good for the api backend for my new website. I was using rocket as a framework. The language itself seemed quite ready for use and the book was very helpful but I found all the libraries I needed were half finished and didn't have the features I needed or if they did they had docs that assume you will read the source code and work m…

Ruby is also a dynamically type, interpreted language with a GIL, that's much older than Rust. You're sacrificing a lot in terms of speed and correctness up front to get something that's easier to jump into.

Rust crates should have documentation though. Rust has great tooling around writing docs in comments and generating the documentation from those. Rust is also statically typed, which makes it easier to reason about what a function does without the docs. In fact, lifetimes give you even more information about the relationship between inputs and outputs than a normal statically typed language.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#73

Post by bb88 »

ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

> I'm very bullish on Rust becoming the language of choice in the 2020s for everything from operating systems, web services, desktop applications, and more. It's that good.

I don't mean to burst your bubble here. But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to something else which makes them feel that way.

Looking at this thread there are plenty of examples of "I love Rust, but..." or "It's a great language once you get past...". My favorite: "There's an awesome web framework but you have to use Rust-nightly..."

Javascript is thought of as a terrible language by language snobs, and yet it has a huge following. Haskell, on the other hand, is much beloved, and doesn't. Don't get me wrong, it's got its share of love, but hasn't seen the explosive growth that python or java has.

The lesson from the early 2000's is that C++ may be a superior language to Java (I used to think that way), however people were so much more productive with Java. They didn't have to worry about memory management, segfaults, crazy C++ semantics, etc. Companies were more willing to throw hardware at a problem to reduce risk/time in development. And that is still true today.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#74

Post by maccam94 »

hyperpallium wrote: post #71
ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

> "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" Didn't ocaml already answer that question? Since ocaml hasn't dominated, it seems something more is required... What has rust got beyond that?

> OCaml bytecode and native code programs can be written in a multithreaded style, with preemptive context switching. However, because the garbage collector of the INRIA OCaml system (which is the only currently available full implementation of the language) is not designed for concurrency, symmetric multiprocessing is unsupported.

--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml

Rust has memory-safe concurrency without a GC.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#75

Post by TylerE »

ilovecaching wrote: post #72
user111233 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a play with rust at the start of the year while I was evaluating if it would be good for the api backend for my new website. I was using rocket as a framework. The language itself seemed quite ready for use and the book was very helpful but I found all the libraries I needed were half finished and didn't have the features I needed or if they did they had docs that assume you will read the source code and work m…

Ruby is also a dynamically type, interpreted language with a GIL, that's much older than Rust. You're sacrificing a lot in terms of speed and correctness up front to get something that's easier to jump into. Rust crates should have documentation though. Rust has great tooling around writing docs in comments and generating the documentation from those. Rust is also statically typed, which makes it easier to reason abo…

Are you?

Every app I've ever written that talks to postgres spends way more time...waiting on postgres than doing anything else.

It's like the joke about getting a faster processor so you're 99% idle instead of 95% idle.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#76

Post by [deleted] »

bb88 wrote: post #73
ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

> I'm very bullish on Rust becoming the language of choice in the 2020s for everything from operating systems, web services, desktop applications, and more. It's that good. I don't mean to burst your bubble here. But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to something else which makes them feel that way. Looking at this thread there are plenty of examples of "I love…

[deleted]

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#77

Post by charliesome »

coder543 wrote: post #10
the_other_guy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may want to have a look at Rocket https://rocket.rs/ , you won't be disappointed

Rocket requires the nightly Rust compiler, which isn't something I find acceptable for production applications, and it's synchronous, so it's really slow. I have been rather disappointed by what I perceive as the author's unwillingness to work towards stable Rust. They have a GitHub issue where they track all of their dependencies on nightly, and kind of just say they aren't going to do anything about it -- it's up t…

> and it's synchronous, so it's really slow.

> it's asynchronous (so it's really fast)

Whether something is 'synchronous' or 'asynchronous' has absolutely no bearing on performance.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#78

Post by rqs »

ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

I think the learning curve thing is depends on what's the language that you are compare it with.

C++ for example, is a hard language, but the learning curve is ... progressive (rise bit by bit).

Rust on the other hand, is like climbing a cliff: You're exposed to everything as soon as you start learning. That's all the Rust things (memory safety model and borrow etc) plus the rest of the knowledge that you need to learn when you normally learning a language (std library & stuff).

Luckily though, Rust did many thing in later years made it a little bit easier to use and learn. Like the rewritten books and manual and in my opinion most importantly few twists to the language.

My biggest (maybe nothing in the big picture) complain about Rust now is maybe it's too community driven, which can sometime cause minor fragmentation.

As a personal developer, if I've already followed every best practice writing my code, then to be honest, after the code is finished, I'm not willing to rewrite my code just to make it dated or work again (I mean, I'll pay my time to do it, but my hate meter will rise). Currently, Rust cannot fully deliver that.

I think Rust need strong leaders to layout a clear and stable plan, so more things can be standardized across it's ecosystem (Somewhat like what Go did, for example, io.Reader && io.Writer is life changing for me). In that way I can keep my hate meter at a safe level.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#79

Post by user111233 »

ilovecaching wrote: post #72
user111233 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a play with rust at the start of the year while I was evaluating if it would be good for the api backend for my new website. I was using rocket as a framework. The language itself seemed quite ready for use and the book was very helpful but I found all the libraries I needed were half finished and didn't have the features I needed or if they did they had docs that assume you will read the source code and work m…

Ruby is also a dynamically type, interpreted language with a GIL, that's much older than Rust. You're sacrificing a lot in terms of speed and correctness up front to get something that's easier to jump into. Rust crates should have documentation though. Rust has great tooling around writing docs in comments and generating the documentation from those. Rust is also statically typed, which makes it easier to reason abo…

I have never felt a typed language slows me down. In a dynamic language you still have to mentally understand what the type of a function is. You can't just throw any data in to it and have it work.

Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting

#80

Post by ilovecaching »

bb88 wrote: post #73
ilovecaching wrote: post #58

Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…

> I'm very bullish on Rust becoming the language of choice in the 2020s for everything from operating systems, web services, desktop applications, and more. It's that good. I don't mean to burst your bubble here. But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to something else which makes them feel that way. Looking at this thread there are plenty of examples of "I love…

> I don't mean to burst your bubble here.

You won't.

> But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to something else which makes them feel that way.

This is relative. Rust is far easier to learn than C++. It has a compiler that will even enforce that you don't shoot yourself in the foot. It also has nice tooling to get you up and running quickly. It has good documentation. It has a free book. We've had no trouble getting our new grads up and running with Rust. It's not that hard.

> Javascript is thought of as a terrible language by language snobs, and yet it has a huge following.

Having a huge following doesn't make it less terrible by the measures of PL theory or sensibility. It's also the only choice on the web, but that may soon change, Rust has first class support for wasm so it's in a good spot there.

> Haskell, on the other hand, is much beloved, and doesn't. Don't get me wrong, it's got its share of love, but hasn't seen the explosive growth that python or java has.

By most accounts the Haskell ecosystem and user base are quite large considering it is intended as a research language, and the community is still growing. Rust isn't intended for research, and it's incredibly young compared to Java or Python, so it has plenty of time to catch up.

> but people were so much more productive with Java.

Hahaha. You mean people wrote a lot of Java. Let's please make the distinction between productivity and writing a bunch of enterprise crapware churned out by barrelful.

> They didn't have to worry about memory management, segfaults, crazy C++ semantics, etc.

That's exactly what Rust does for you.

> Companies were more willing to throw hardware at a problem to reduce risk/time in development. And that is still true today.

Actually companies are becoming more aware that speed is a feature, and that Moore's law isn't holding out. We're also moving to smaller form factors: phones, watches, glasses... the future is not on the desktop by any means, and no one wants to waste capacity in a datacenter needlessly.

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