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Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

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Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#181

Post by sondr3 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #160
fhrow4484 wrote: post #99

The Rust documentation is a bit outdated: https://www.google.com/search?q=rust+tour the 1st result is "A 30-minute Introduction to Rust". Going through it requires 4 navigations from the user to get to a valid page, everything in between is deprecated

Interesting! That page has been deprecated for something like four years... thanks for pointing this out. I've seen people mention other pages before, but never this one.

I'd also like to mention that getting to the documentation for anything with Rust is fairly annoying, mostly because a ton of the stuff in the book links to the first edition and getting from the first edition to the current one is really cumbersome. It'd be great if you would be redirected from the old book to the latest version instead of getting to it and only get a warning that it isn't the latest version. Especially since there's no easy way to go from the first edition chapter to the corresponding one in the latest, it's at least three-four clicks and annoys me every single time.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#182

Post by steveklabnik »

sondr3 wrote: post #181
steveklabnik wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! That page has been deprecated for something like four years... thanks for pointing this out. I've seen people mention other pages before, but never this one.

I'd also like to mention that getting to the documentation for anything with Rust is fairly annoying, mostly because a ton of the stuff in the book links to the first edition and getting from the first edition to the current one is really cumbersome. It'd be great if you would be redirected from the old book to the latest version instead of getting to it and only get a warning that it isn't the latest version. Especi…

Can you please file bugs when you see this? I'd be happy to update them to point in the right place.

We have some constraints that make plain redirects really hard; we cannot run a web server or use a ton of JavaScript, for example. Maybe this situation is painful enough for community consensus to change...

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#183

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

any shop that is considering Rust would need to consider the question of how to hire or train a sufficient number of programmers. With any mainstream language you have a big pool of programmers up for hire, my guess is that this is more of a problem with a new languages like Rust.

Maybe that's the reason why they did hype Java to such an extent when it was a new platform, i think SUN understood that it is quite difficult to gain acceptance as a mainstream player in this game.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#184

Post by lambda »

steveklabnik wrote: post #157
lambda wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditional compilation? There's still just a placeholder referring to the first version of the book or the reference. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/conditional-compilation.html pub(crate) doesn't seem to be mentioned in https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch07-02-modules-and-use-to-co... . Some things that are covered are a bit hard to find. For example, I didn't know if operator overloading was covered; it turns out, i…

Thanks! So I think that some of this difference is that you're mostly describing library features, not language features. It's also true that some of these examples blur the lines. I'm going to make some notes. > it might be a good idea to remove the scary warning from it, or to do an audit of it and only put the warning on the sections that are found to be incomplete Completeness is hard , as you've seen with the bo…

I'd say that most of these are language features. The only that are mostly library features are operator overloading and simd, but they both have associated language features supporting them.

I agree that completeness is hard, but I feel like it could be a bit easier if there were some consolidation of the material.

At the very least, make sure that everything covered in the 2018 edition guide is also covered in the Book, in at least a similar level of detail. I'd also make sure that everything covered in the Reference is covered in the Book, or the Book provides at least an introduction to the topic and then a reference to the more detailed information in the Reference.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#185

Post by 1-KB-OK »

oscargrouch wrote: post #106
cageface wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it makes sense to read the success of Golang as a smart piece of social engineering. Start with a simple and accessible language and gradually ratchet up the complexity to deal with more real-world problems. You may eventually wind up with a worse language but at least you'll have users. Rust tried to solve a lot of hard problems out of the gate and that has slowed its growth IMO. It's sort of another worse-is-…

I dont think that by looking only to features we can understand this very well. Go was very lucky to be launched when cloud computing fever was catching up, and people were being burned for using techs like Java for this end. C++ were very performant, and unlike Java not a memory hog, but for this sort of tasks it was deemed to complex. Besides the ammount of people that were able to program in it was limited (and yo…

It's a good point that a language needs a platform to really shine. I think one place where Rust can find it is by targeting WASM and being the first systems language that can compile to code that runs in the browser. The rustc compiler supports WASM out of the box and I think this is one direction that the language adoption is going to grow.

Another platform is cryptocurrencies/blockchains- Rust lends itself uniquely as a modern C++ for writing performant blockchain protocols. This is evidenced by the Parity team using Rust exclusively for all their projects. As that world evolves Rust can find a foothold there as well - there is no real legacy code floating around, the Bitcoin protocol is only 10 years old.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#186

Post by steveklabnik »

lambda wrote: post #184
steveklabnik wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! So I think that some of this difference is that you're mostly describing library features, not language features. It's also true that some of these examples blur the lines. I'm going to make some notes. > it might be a good idea to remove the scary warning from it, or to do an audit of it and only put the warning on the sections that are found to be incomplete Completeness is hard , as you've seen with the bo…

I'd say that most of these are language features. The only that are mostly library features are operator overloading and simd, but they both have associated language features supporting them. I agree that completeness is hard, but I feel like it could be a bit easier if there were some consolidation of the material. At the very least, make sure that everything covered in the 2018 edition guide is also covered in the…

> I'd also make sure that everything covered in the Reference is covered in the Book,

They have very different goals, so this will never happen. The Book's job is to teach you how to program in Rust. The referece's goal is to (eventually) be a full specification. The former must be a sub-set of the latter.

I do agree that everything should be documented, but the book cannot cover every last possible thing.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#187

Post by pjmlp »

phkahler wrote: post #170
qznc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe C would be a good example for negative space. The spirit of C [0] explicitly contains "keep the language small and simple". [0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/spirit_of_c.html

Came here to comment on C. IMHO it remains a gem in the space of languages, probably because it remains small and simple. It has many warts, but it does not suffer in the way C++ does. People claim Rust is a better C++ and as from my outsider point of view it looks like it is. One of my fears is that it will follow C++ down the very road the author is concerned about.

Small yes.

Simple, only for those that never read ISO C, or tried to write actual portable C code, instead of using gcc C and GNU/Linux everywhere.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#188

Post by pjmlp »

e3b0c wrote: post #111
cageface wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tends to happen is that you bring out a simplified, cleaned-up version of the popular language of the day. People then flock to that new language and start making feature requests. Over time that language becomes as complex and inelegant as the language it replaced and you can start the whole cycle all over again. The move from C++ -> Java -> Go is a perfect example of this cycle.

C is a language designed to enable more efficient communication between the computer and the programmer in mind. C++ is a language designed to enable more communication between the compiler and the programmer. Go is a language designed to enable more efficient communication between programmers.

C was a language designed by two developers without background in language design that got lucky, because Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell UNIX thus it ended up licensing it for a symbolic price to universities.

C was hardly efficient in the 80s micro-computers, and outside Bell Labs people were doing compiler optimization research in languages like PL.8 and similar.

Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell UNIX and history would certainly looked much different.

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#189

Post by pjmlp »

pantalaimon wrote: post #72
CJefferson wrote: post #2

I can't agree more with this. I am a long time c++ dev, been to c++ committee meetings. The language is too complicated and inconsistent, and that is now I believe unfixable. I believe no one understands it. New features keep arriving, but you still have to learn everything that came before, for older codebases. For example, {} style initalisers were added to simplify and "unify" things. Except to make a vector of le…

I feel like C is having a renaissance because of that. C is very conservative in adding new features, which makes it easy to get an understanding of the language - nothing is hidden, when necessary you can derive everything you need to know about a piece of code from first principles. C compared to C++ feels like high school math compared to university math with all it's scary notations.

Where is that renaissance happening?!?

Certainly not in the C compilers that have been ported to C++, the OSes that now push for C++ instead of C, automative standards that replaced C by C++14 as certified language, IoT platforms based on C++,...

Re: Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth

#190

Post by pjmlp »

paulddraper wrote: post #55
izacus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but that's been the tune we've been constantly hearing for years now. Always the "next big thing" killing off C++ or Java or something with its superiority. And yet, somehow, when choosing a very efficient language that has 1st party support, we always end up with pretty much one widely supported answer: the horror that is C++. Why do you think that Rust will be a different story this time?

Nothing will "kill off" C++. Nothing -- not even C++ -- "killed off" C. But it's share of total usage can and will decrease. Java certainly took a massive chunk of the "programming market" that would have otherwise been C++. And then later JavaScript. Of course, software usage in general has been going up and up, so in absolute terms C++ has been increasing as well.

C++ has a hard fight against C on embedded platforms where we still have devs using C89 + Assembly, and on classical UNIX flavours.

It certainly looks much different in other platforms and modern OSes.

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