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John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

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Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#22
post #12
post #3

C++ continues to lose mind-share. When will the community acknowledge that their tooling is lacking?

Where? On HN and Reddit? I see new code bases in C++ springing up like mushrooms. I'd prefer Haskell/ML, but I can't deny reality.

It seems the market for people who can convert systems from other languages to Rust is starting to appear. At least in the last couple of months there has been quite a few offers in Berlin for people who can write and teach Rust.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#23

When I explored rust I found the exact same feeling too, but couldn't find that word. My only issue is how surprisingly weak Rust support is in my favourite editor. Rust seems to feel more popular than it is. Or maybe more people write Rust in a "no frills notepad" kind of way.

As an Emacs nerd I did have to find and download a Rust mode. I imagine in the future Rust will get more support in editors.

I've also just started writing Rust in the domain in which I write code, low level networking. I think I agree with Carmack in that it feels good. I can get hungup on syntax when learning a new language and I don't have that problem so much in Rust. I've been writing code in many different languages for close to 30 years and learning Rust feels mostly right. It feels like when I learned Python or LISP and I could guess at syntax and just get it right. As opposed to writing /bin/sh for over twenty years and still needing to constantly look up syntax :(

It doesn't feel like some languages I've learned in the past where everytime I investigate something I face-palm. It seems like the more I investigate it the right choices were made. Even when I'm frustrated with it because the compiler won't let me do something simple, I understand that maybe the bad habit I learned in C should end. Rust forces you to deal with things upfront that may become problems later. It's sometimes annoying when you want to just get shit done, but it's the 'right thing' to do.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#24
post #4

Many comments in twitter mentions rust still not being ready for server code ( which i start to feel strange since concurrency is the only major issue on the server side, and supposed to be rust strength). Anyone can confirm ?

Multithreading and multiprocessing work fine, however they may be referring to m:n (aka "async"), which is a story still being written and which the borrow checker currently can make much more frustrating than expected by other languages with m:n threading support (e.g. you can't just close over a lexical variable then use it in multiple steps of an asychronous processing pipeline).

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#25
post #20

When I explored rust I found the exact same feeling too, but couldn't find that word. My only issue is how surprisingly weak Rust support is in my favourite editor. Rust seems to feel more popular than it is. Or maybe more people write Rust in a "no frills notepad" kind of way.

vscode has pretty good support for rust. If you need something more advanced, you can try clion from jetbrains with the intellij-rust plug-in.

Vscode is what I tried. It was critically flawed where the autocomplete would crash or be missing half the options you'd expect.

I will need to try again. It's been six months.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#26

When I explored rust I found the exact same feeling too, but couldn't find that word. My only issue is how surprisingly weak Rust support is in my favourite editor. Rust seems to feel more popular than it is. Or maybe more people write Rust in a "no frills notepad" kind of way.

As an Emacs nerd I did have to find and download a Rust mode. I imagine in the future Rust will get more support in editors. I've also just started writing Rust in the domain in which I write code, low level networking. I think I agree with Carmack in that it feels good. I can get hungup on syntax when learning a new language and I don't have that problem so much in Rust. I've been writing code in many different lang…

It's so nice hearing this from someone with as much experience as you. I have far less but one feeling I had lately when switching to typescript was, "instead of turning off this warning, maybe they're right. Maybe this is a bad habit."

It forced me to think harder about my code's structure. I think that's what I like about Rust too. Not being able to do anything means I have to be thoughtful.

Which also reminds me of how to be creative with games or writing or music: artificially limit yourself and you're forced to be more thoughtful.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#27
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode has pretty good support for rust. If you need something more advanced, you can try clion from jetbrains with the intellij-rust plug-in.

Vscode is what I tried. It was critically flawed where the autocomplete would crash or be missing half the options you'd expect. I will need to try again. It's been six months.

I can vouch for CLion with intellij-rust, it is by far the best Rust editor/IDE available at the moment. RLS still suffers from slow/no auto completion and crashes too much for my liking. The pace and features that are coming out of the team working on intellij-rust is amazing: https://intellij-rust.github.io/thisweek/.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tool is a tool. It's immaterial if a particular tool like C++ and its ecosystem is no longer the best available tool for some applications. Workmen pick the tool that best suits their tasks, and if a better tool appears it makes no sense to assume that the old tool requires more attention.

C++ has many users that love the language but are in denial that other languages have advanced beyond it (not in all areas, of course, but enough areas that matter).

Do you use C++? I do, and I don't love the language. What I like about C++ is that it's a high level low level language. Anything that isn't is not a competitor in C++'s core application areas. D and OCaml come kinda close but they have (in practice) mandatory garbage collection. The only real alternatives are Ada (which somehow never achieved much mindshare) and Rust.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#29
post #3

C++ continues to lose mind-share. When will the community acknowledge that their tooling is lacking?

C++ is actually doing very well, and the community is very well aware that C++ tooling sucks. It's just not an easy problem to solve because it has such a huge amount of existing code and projects.

Re: John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome

#30
post #21
post #3

C++ continues to lose mind-share. When will the community acknowledge that their tooling is lacking?

If it does, than not to Rust. Comparing tooling support for c++ and rust... In that comparison c++ completely overwhelms rust

I like C++ but I think he meant in terms of how sane and usable the tools are, in which case Rust easily wins. Compare Cargo to CMake for example.

Sure it might not have as many IDEs, static analysers, debuggers and so on, but I'd easily take Rust's build system over C++'s tool ecosystem.

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