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Four Years of Rust

blog.rust-lang.org

51–60 of 203 posts

Re: Four Years of Rust

#51
post #23
post #18

> Rust+WASM went from an experiment to a usable product, making rustc the first compiler with focus on supporting WASM This may be the most interesting use case of them all. WebAssembly is fast, but it's also not fun to write. There are languages like AssemblyScript and Lys that will let you write WebAssembly in what appears to be a higher-level language, but you're still schlepping bytes around and must build the en…

Curious: if you rip out the js runtime in favor of pure webassembly, does that have a significant impact on electron viability? Obviously only once webassembly can do the full job

WebAssembly can't touch the DOM without JavaScript. Does that change your question?

Re: Four Years of Rust

#52
post #11

I wonder how many Rust users really want linear types and borrow checking, instead of the other stuff Rust brings to the table: modern language design, large and friendly community, nice type system, native compilation, good package ecosystem. Personally I would prefer a well-designed GC'd language with a strong type system and native compilation over Rust, unless I was doing something with specific demands on parall…

Personally I started looking at Rust precisely because borrow checking is a massive improvement over the C/ASM wild west.

If you like GC, I feel like there are plenty of other good options, like D, Ocaml, CLR languages (C#/F#).

Re: Four Years of Rust

#53
post #11

I wonder how many Rust users really want linear types and borrow checking, instead of the other stuff Rust brings to the table: modern language design, large and friendly community, nice type system, native compilation, good package ecosystem. Personally I would prefer a well-designed GC'd language with a strong type system and native compilation over Rust, unless I was doing something with specific demands on parall…

That's what I love about Rust, you get all of those things without having to sacrifice performance. i.e. I get a modern language, get to write code at a relatively high level, and still don't even have to use a GC. You learn to love the borrow checker, it's an amazing tool to work with.

Re: Four Years of Rust

#54
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: if you rip out the js runtime in favor of pure webassembly, does that have a significant impact on electron viability? Obviously only once webassembly can do the full job

WebAssembly can't touch the DOM without JavaScript. Does that change your question?

... for now. We've built the Rust/Wasm story such that once wasm gains that ability, your code gets upgraded internally, with no API changes. You're already ready for the future!

Re: Four Years of Rust

#55
post #11

I wonder how many Rust users really want linear types and borrow checking, instead of the other stuff Rust brings to the table: modern language design, large and friendly community, nice type system, native compilation, good package ecosystem. Personally I would prefer a well-designed GC'd language with a strong type system and native compilation over Rust, unless I was doing something with specific demands on parall…

> I wonder how many Rust users really want linear types and borrow checking, instead of the other stuff Rust brings to the table: modern language design, large and friendly community, nice type system, native compilation, good package ecosystem.

I think there are probably more users that would love this but they are not users of the language to begin with. The community that actually forms around Rust is the type of community that does not want GCs, wants the borrow checker and the constraints that form the language.

Re: Four Years of Rust

#56

I really want to like Rust, and I've made a few attempts in the past to get involved - I wrote a database driver for a time series database (KDB) in pure Rust among a few other things. I've even done a couple deep dives into rustc to figure out the cause of some iterator slowness (it wasn't giving proper hinting in the LLVM IM). However, I keep having to step back. And in this short time Rust has progressed a lot (an…

On practicality: I have written a ~30KLOC system for provisioning, configuration and management of a medium-size (500 switches) event network, with an ASP.net-like web frontend GUI, all entirely in Rust with PostgreSQL backend. The system was used for the past two years at an event for 20K people.

So it is very practical stuff for me :)

The biggest difficulty was absence of something analogous to ASP.net, so I had to invent my own... but even there it proved an excellent and practical choice, the macro system is very expressive and the strong typing gives a lot of confidence when refactoring.

Re: Four Years of Rust

#57

I love watching Rust progress. But the #1 thing I'm watching is the RLS and vscode plugin. Maybe I'm weird but I work with so many languages that having to manage multiple editors is a non-start. So any time I have a little personal project that could be done in Rust (for learning) I end up using Go or Python instead because the vscode support is still quite buggy. Naturally others will say you don't need IDE-like su…

If you're open to a different ide, intellij idea or CLion with the rust plugin is a really great combo.

Idea + rust is free minus debugging.

Re: Four Years of Rust

#58
I need a rust interpreter yesterday. Sometimes you just want to see quick feedback.

rustic doesn't work and excvr (or something similar) is bloody slow

Re: Four Years of Rust

#59

I really want to like Rust, and I've made a few attempts in the past to get involved - I wrote a database driver for a time series database (KDB) in pure Rust among a few other things. I've even done a couple deep dives into rustc to figure out the cause of some iterator slowness (it wasn't giving proper hinting in the LLVM IM). However, I keep having to step back. And in this short time Rust has progressed a lot (an…

You speak of low latency code and doubly linked lists in the same breath.

Personally, I have moved from linked data structures to more cache friendly data structures, which means contiguous spaces. No jumping around. It's very liberating.

Re: Four Years of Rust

#60
post #2

I'm itching to get my hands dirty with Rust, but, approaching this from a web developer background (hence minimal low level language experience), I have no idea where to start. I have a Raspberry Pi3 sitting on my desk, perhaps I should start there. Congrats to the Rust Core Team!

Thanks! A lot of web dev people start off by writing command-line tools. Later this year, Rust will also be significantly easier to write server-side web stuff in, it’s a little tough to get into at the moment. You could also try front-end web stuff with WebAssembly! The PI stuff is also a good choice. There’s links to learn more about these topics on https://www.rust-lang.org/ that should help you get started!

"later this year"..

please don't be shy Steve- just say it out loud - "when await arrives"- you'd be the last person to be blamed for circle jerk

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