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Still in love with Rust

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Re: Still in love with Rust

#21

Post by Laaas »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #12

"No race conditions, leaking resources, dangling pointers, unhandled exceptions, ..., the list goes on." Except of dangling pointers, Rust has everything else from this list. About compilation time issue: it doesn't exist anymore. Current versions do "cargo check" in a few seconds even for big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it because of incremental compilation. F…

It is indeed true that you can unintentionally leak resources, but it is still much harder. Also, what do you mean that it has unhandled exceptions and race conditions? Rust doesn't even have exceptions (although there are panics, which is not the same thing), and race conditions are statically prevented in safe code due to how a mutable reference works.

Re: Still in love with Rust

#22

Post by jerrre »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #12

"No race conditions, leaking resources, dangling pointers, unhandled exceptions, ..., the list goes on." Except of dangling pointers, Rust has everything else from this list. About compilation time issue: it doesn't exist anymore. Current versions do "cargo check" in a few seconds even for big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it because of incremental compilation. F…

>big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it

I don't think 45k LoC could be considered big, and I _do_ think a couple minutes compile time is a problem. I say that as a C++ programmer, a full recompile will easily get me out of the zone

Re: Still in love with Rust

#23

Post by kungtotte »

Another point against Rust is binary size.

If you write the Fibonacci generator in one of the first chapters of the Rust book it will create a 4MB binary. Even stripped it's over 400KB.

If you write the same code in Nim it compiles down to 112KB with debug symbols, unstripped. Statically linked against libc (still with debug symbols) it's only 850KB.

850KB statically linked versus ~450KB dynamically linked and stripped.

For code that is virtually identical.

Re: Still in love with Rust

#24

Post by jerrre »

> Let's face it – typically developers are familiar with OOP, garbage collected, dynamic programming languages.

I think most of these programmers, and their project are not the target of Rust? If you're writing Java/C# or higher level languages, you already made the choice to sacrifice some computing efficiency for programming efficiency.

I always thought Rust was more destined to convert C and C++ (and D/Swift/Go ?) programmers, that need the raw power and control.

Re: Still in love with Rust

#25

Post by leni536 »

I tried Rust a few weeks ago. Is my understanding correct that Rust doesn't have the equivalents to the following C++ features yet?

- non-type and template template parameters

- constexpr functions

I understand that Rust macros can replace them some of the time, and they are much better then the C preprocessor, but that's quite a low bar to meet. Last time I checked non-type template parameters (called "const generics" in Rust) is on the roadmap, so it is promising.

Re: Still in love with Rust

#26

Post by monocasa »

Svip wrote: post #7

Thank you for this piece. I am working on a game, that I am prototyping in Go. In my prototype, I have just entered the realm of multiple threads, and for this project to work out, it needs to handle quite a lot of threads working on the same resources. While I have not personally dappled this far into concurrency in Go myself, I have read plenty of articles where developers recommend using the mutex package rather t…

There was a great talk recently about how to properly build an entity component framework in Rust if you haven't seen it yet.

https://youtu.be/aKLntZcp27M

Re: Still in love with Rust

#27

Post by EugeneOZ »

Laaas wrote: post #21
EugeneOZ wrote: post #12

"No race conditions, leaking resources, dangling pointers, unhandled exceptions, ..., the list goes on." Except of dangling pointers, Rust has everything else from this list. About compilation time issue: it doesn't exist anymore. Current versions do "cargo check" in a few seconds even for big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it because of incremental compilation. F…

It is indeed true that you can unintentionally leak resources, but it is still much harder. Also, what do you mean that it has unhandled exceptions and race conditions? Rust doesn't even have exceptions (although there are panics, which is not the same thing), and race conditions are statically prevented in safe code due to how a mutable reference works.

Theoretically they are different, in practice they are the same (it's just more difficult to handle panicking - sometimes you can't use catch_unwind because of it's trait limitations).

About race conditions: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/races.html

Re: Still in love with Rust

#28

Post by EugeneOZ »

jerrre wrote: post #22
EugeneOZ wrote: post #12

"No race conditions, leaking resources, dangling pointers, unhandled exceptions, ..., the list goes on." Except of dangling pointers, Rust has everything else from this list. About compilation time issue: it doesn't exist anymore. Current versions do "cargo check" in a few seconds even for big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it because of incremental compilation. F…

>big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it I don't think 45k LoC could be considered big, and I _do_ think a couple minutes compile time is a problem. I say that as a C++ programmer, a full recompile will easily get me out of the zone

Out of curiosity, not to argue: how much time it takes in C++ to compile 45k LoC?

Re: Still in love with Rust

#29

Post by th0br0 »

leni536 wrote: post #25

I tried Rust a few weeks ago. Is my understanding correct that Rust doesn't have the equivalents to the following C++ features yet? - non-type and template template parameters - constexpr functions I understand that Rust macros can replace them some of the time, and they are much better then the C preprocessor, but that's quite a low bar to meet. Last time I checked non-type template parameters (called "const generic…

A `const fn` RFC is accepted and somwhat available when using nightly compilers, also see https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/24111

Re: Still in love with Rust

#30

Post by adrianN »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #28
jerrre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>big projects (my biggest project is 45k LoC) and it takes a couple of minutes to compile it I don't think 45k LoC could be considered big, and I _do_ think a couple minutes compile time is a problem. I say that as a C++ programmer, a full recompile will easily get me out of the zone

Out of curiosity, not to argue: how much time it takes in C++ to compile 45k LoC?

That really heavily depends on the kind of code. Template metaprogramming slows down the compiler a lot.
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