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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

#81

Post by sanderjd »

TylerE wrote: post #75
ilovecaching wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always found it easier to improve the time waiting for postgres by tuning critical queries than to track down runaway memory usage and tune garbage collection. I also felt like I spent a lot of my wall clock time during active development waiting for apps to start up and run tests or whatever. There are best practices which speak to most of this, but they were hard won.

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

#82

Post by dxhdr »

user111233 wrote: post #79
ilovecaching wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

JavaScript would like a word with you.

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

#83

Post by dman »

ilovecaching wrote: post #80
bb88 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 document…

I think Rust should stop looking at C++ as the becnhmark / comparison point for complexity. The expectations that developers have from languages has increased over time, and Rust itself has contributed to raising that bar.

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

#84

Post by mwcampbell »

Dowwie wrote: post #64
joobus wrote: post #34

I'm optimistic for the future of Rust. I currently program in Go for server side web stuff, but with the proposed changes to the Go language, the decision to choose Go over Rust becomes less compelling; Rust already has generics, a competent module system, better error handling, and ADTs. Go had a very narrow scope and very clear oversights, which are now bigger issues they are trying to shoehorn solutions into with…

It's web ready. It's very web ready.

IMO it's not really web ready until there's one web framework that has a clear majority of mindshare, like Rails for Ruby or Django for Python.

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

#85

Post by dbcurtis »

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…

> Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?"

My biggest gripe is that they left out readability.

I like the semantics of Rust, and appreciate the performance and the transparent memory model. I am extremely excited to try Rust on an embedded project.

Bur honestly, the syntax is gruesome. Coming from Python, Rust looks like two rabid gerbils had a war dance on my keyboard.

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

#86

Post by ilovecaching »

dbcurtis wrote: post #85
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…

> Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My biggest gripe is that they left out readability. I like the semantics of Rust, and appreciate the performance and the transparent memory model. I am extremely excited to try Rust on an embedded project. Bur honestly, the syntax is gruesome. Coming from Python, Rust looks like two rabid gerbils had a war dance…

Well... compared to Python is kind of an apples to oranges comparison. Compared to Java or C++ I find it to be incredibly direct and expressive. Rust definitely doesn't stop you from writing spaghetti, but no language does.

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

#87

Post by karavelov »

nevi-me wrote: post #18

I've enjoyed learning Rust, but I'm at the stage where I'm hitting constant stumbling blocks because of the slightly niche nature of what I'm doing. It's the ugly side of Rust; when you're stuck with a series of problems that you can't solve (or take too long to solve), when there aren't enough people in the community to help you, and you end up being unproductive for a while. Where I've seen small projects to their…

It depends how you approach learning Rust. If you expect learning curve as going from Java to C#, you are going to be disappointed. If you expect learning curve like going from Java to Haskell, it will be more in-line with expectations.

My point is that we very much align out expectations for the dominant paradigm and we got surprized when we have to actually "learn", i.e. internalize some different logic.

BTW, I started feel comfortable with Rust/Tokio/futures/etc. in less than a month. But I come from Scala/C++/logic and type theory background, that I guess is not so common.

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

#88

Post by steveklabnik »

dman wrote: post #83
ilovecaching wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 document…

I think Rust should stop looking at C++ as the becnhmark / comparison point for complexity. The expectations that developers have from languages has increased over time, and Rust itself has contributed to raising that bar.

We don’t generally consider other languages as a measure of what complexity is “okay” or something, and are extremely aware of Rust’s complexity. Rust has a lot of requirements that directly lead to a lot of that complexity. But it’s neccesary, not incidental. Or that’s the hope, at least. Rust is also not perfect.

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

#89

Post by bb88 »

ilovecaching wrote: post #80
bb88 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 document…

See the thing is that I agree with most of your statements, so you're really not changing my mind with your arguments.

> Actually companies are becoming more aware that speed is a feature

No. If that were true, Python wouldn't be the fastest growing language, and we'd be hand optimizing everything in assembly and using languages that allowed us to do that (C). That was the entire point I was making. It's why Java won.

I can't figure out if Rust is serious about being a true competitor, or just merely riding the peak on the Gartner Hype Cycle [1].

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

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

#90

Post by nevi-me »

bluejekyll wrote: post #55
nicoburns wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the tokio/async ecosystem just isn't ready for prime time. Hopefully this (and compile times!) get much better.

The issue isn't exactly that it's not ready for prime time, but that it's not ergonomic at the moment. The biggest issue that you have to get used to is that pretty much everything has to be owned data, and no references passed around when constructing Future types. This can feel like it comes into conflict with the poll(&mut self) interface (in 0.1). Also, I found truly understanding the fact that returning data fro…

One of the challenges I'm having now is with some library that connects to a steaming pubsub server. I found a problem with the library, my use-case differs from what's being tested, and because I'm struggling to use the library the way the author suggests; I'm unable to convince them that being unable to Clone their data structure is causing a problem.

I unfortunately am not at the point of "X didn't work, so I wrote Y" as that's how we end up with competing libraries.

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