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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

#151

Post by grumpydba »

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…

Yes but from a bird's eye view, rust code looks like perl. The readability is still a huge plus for go, even with the v2 proposals.

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

#152

Post by olavk »

scardine wrote: post #111
ilovecaching wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community is growing like crazy, thus Python grows. Even though Python is secretly calling Fortran for scipy, or Tensorflow (C++), or PyTorch (also C++), all of which would make good candidates for Rust replacements. So obviously speed is necessary to enable what people…

tl;dr: despite being relatively slow Python is a fantastic glue language. Some people thing rust is well positioned to steal Python's dinner.

Rust will not steal Pythons dinner, they are used for completely different domains. The comment was saying that Rust might be a realistic alternative to C/C++/Fortran for modules which are not written in Python.

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

#153

Post by pjmlp »

__bjoernd wrote: post #138
pjmlp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of those reasons are political, not technical. Like C on embedded vs C++. On Windows large majority of apps are in .NET with some C++. On OS X and derived systems it is all about Objective-C and Swift for desktop apps. C++ is mostly used for drivers, LLVM tooling and Metal shaders. Android is Java with some C++. ChromeOS is all about JavaScript. So no, C and C++ have lost the desktop, nowadays they are used for…

C is not used in the embedded space for 'political' reasons but for the fact that in contrast to C++ you have full control over what your program does and don't have to worry about when certain functions get magically called and why the size of your two-int struct is suddenly way larger than the 64 bits you expected it to be. Sure, this is all a matter of 'using it right', but from my experience many developers in th…

Sure it is for political reasons when even C99 is seen as too modern, and many are unwilling to let go of C89 and Assembly even if the OEM toolchain supports modern C.

And for another point of view of someone more relevant than my insignificant self,

CppCon 2016: Dan Saks “extern c: Talking to C Programmers about C++”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Sd8A6_fYU

"Embedded Development with Dan Saks"

http://cppcast.com/2016/10/dan-saks/

Thankfully there are industry certification standards like AUTOSAR, which now require C++, so those devs can choose to keep grasping to C and switch industry or learn more modern languages.

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

#154

Post by carlmr »

olavk wrote: post #148
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…

Comparing Haskell to JavaScript is silly - JavaScript is popular because it is the only option in the browser. It has noting to do with the quality of the language itself. If VBScript had won, everyone would be using that. If Netscape had decided to use Scheme or Haskell as the scripting language, this is what everyone would be using. Rust is competing in the space of C and C++, it is not competing against Java or Py…

>heavyweights like Word or Photoshop are written in C++ and Rust may be a realistic migration

Especially we've gotten used to so many of C++ shortcomings that we don't see them, but someone learning both Rust and C++ will (I'm sure) have a better experience in Rust. Even just the built in tooling (Cargo test, Cargo crates, rustup, etc.) feels so much more mature than when you're in 2018 looking at how to compile some C++ without an IDE.

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

#155

Post by olavk »

mbo wrote: post #124
scardine wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: despite being relatively slow Python is a fantastic glue language. Some people thing rust is well positioned to steal Python's dinner.

To be fair, it's much more likely that Julia will be stealing Python's dinner, rather than Rust.

Django is not going to be rewritten in Julia. Neither is Linux going to be rewritten in Python. Different languages have different domains. Some of these comments seem to think all languages is competing in the same domain as if Rust is a direct competitor to Julia or JavaScript.

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

#156

Post by mcjiggerlog »

shmerl wrote: post #122
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite Java's growth, C remains the language of choice for operating systems and C++ for web browsers, desktop applications, games and high performance web services. Rust is really only competing with C/C++, not JavaScript or even Java (or Go).

I'm waiting for game engines to pick up Rust.

Not sure why downvoted. A language aimed at replacing systems languages like C++, which happens to be the go-to language for game development, seems like a reasonable choice for a game engine.

There's actually a website dedicated to tracking this - http://arewegameyet.com/

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

#157

Post by carlmr »

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…

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

What exactly is terrible about it? The snake_case I got used to, I kind of like having braces, and that's not really a killer argument either, because most languages have them, apart from that I find Rust also much cleaner than Python syntax. I'm really not sure what you mean. Is it the lifetime annotations (because they're somewhat necessary).

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

#158

Post by jayflux »

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.

Woah, I’m a big fan of rust, but saying it’s web ready is disingenuous. Rocket isn’t stable, most of the libraries rocket depends on aren’t stable either. Making http requests.. are there any stable http libraries yet? Last I checked Hyper was still on a 0 release with no h2 support.

Rust has conquered a lot, but it’s web service/API story is not complete yet. Go is ahead in this respect.

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

#159

Post by nestorD »

throwaway487548 wrote: post #134

It seems that the main problem with Rust is that it has been grown up not from the CS and PL theory fundamentals , like ML, or Scheme or Erlang or even Go, and it is obviously not a small, clean language everyone loves and appreciates as being beautiful. In other words it is just little better than C++, which is a crap. If a language could be grown from ML (Ocaml) roots (like Scala) instead of C++, it could be much s…

I would love to see more ML derived language gain traction (F# being my current favorite) but it has to be said that Rust was first derived from Ocaml : https://fr.slideshare.net/KelCecil/hey-theres-ocaml-in-my-ru...

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

#160

Post by vaylian »

rqs wrote: post #78
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 lea…

> 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.

Just to add my opinion, not to disagree: I followed the development of Rust for several years now (starting before 1.0). Rust's approach to language evolution is very much community-driven (like you said). But this also led to many really good ideas coming from people with different backgrounds. Today, Rust feels like a highly optimized breed of good ideas taken from many programming languages and I know of no other language that feels like that. Sure, every new language gets inspiration from older languages, but Rust appears to be more "extreme" than other languages (and I do not mean "extreme" in a negative sense). This was most visible in the pre-1.0 era. People had different ideas how the language should work and the Rust team tried different things and iterated on the things they learned. And I think this was totally worthwhile.

Let's talk about Python for a moment. I really like Python. It is a language with clear conventions and idioms. And most likely it achieved this state thanks to Guido van Rossum who had very clear ideas about what the language should be. And one of the core ideas is simplicity. Python (being inspired by ABC) was meant to be easy to learn (because of it's simplicity).

Now, let's go back to Rust. Rust also has clear ideas: "Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed" (Quoted from: This Week in Rust). And yes, "consistency" or "ease of learning" are not listed as the core ideas. However, when you look at the Rust roadmap for 2017 you will also see that the team has prioritized the following items:

* Rust should have a lower learning curve

* productivity (which includes easier usage of the language)

These issues are definitely on the radar of the Rust team. But I also think that these issues can only be tackled by an entire community which shares and discusses ideas. Rust tries to be much more than other languages and I think it is highly unlikely that a single leader will know how to direct the language in a specific direction. There are still a lot of things to be figured out. For example, let's see if the failure crate becomes the standard for error handling in Rust.

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