I work in the embedded space, but the majority of my work is writing simuators, mathematical models and tests. One of the hidden benefits for us was that rust is suitable for both resource-constrained embedded code (we use a lot of C for this) and high-level desktop and cloud based infrastructure/sim/test code, which we would never consider writing in C. Serde is amazing, crates.io has so much good stuff on it, C interop is a breeze. We still use Python/matlab for exploratory and data-sciency work, but as soon as something lives for more than about 6 months, it usually gets re-written in rust.
What is Rust and why is it so popular?
51–60 of 284 posts
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#52Rust is a great language if you use for what was intended, system programming and as safe substitute of C and C++. But it's not the answer of everything, to me it's nowadays abused in a lot of projects, there are instances of project where using Rust not only doesn't make a lot of sense but also can be slower than another languages, there are cases where Go is better, other where Node.js is better, other where Python…
OK, I will bite. If I had to come up with a case where Python is better than Rust, I would say with rapid prototyping and scientific computing. If you just want to try a few things out, python has faster development cycle and if you want to do some super clever math python has better library support. With a bit more mind stretching, I can make a case for Go with a bit more mind stretching. If you want to write a massively parallel network server of some sort you might be better off with Go, especially if you want to use protobufs and grpc. But what would be the case for Node and Java?
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#53The more pressing question: What is Rust and why is it so popular on HN?
People like to believe that the biggest problem they have with their code is memory safety, a problem Rust puts a significant effort into solving. At this point, most uses of Rust are also entirely academic, which appeals to HNs because they prefer theory to reality because reality is messy.
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#54Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#55Over the last couple of months I've been slowly, but steadily playing with Rust. I work on embedded systems and while it's gaining traction only slowly, it feels to me reasonably likely that we'll be seeing non-trivial applications in the next 8-10 years. I doubt that we'll see it used for low-power/resource-constrained firmware, but lots and lots of embedded systems are now bulky Linux boxes with years of uptime, an…
I think that Rust's approach to safety -- soundly eliminate UB in safe code -- comes at the high cost of complexity. This affects how easy it is to write custom compilers (very important in the embedded space), but it is also not necessarily the best way to reduce bugs. For some, this cost is acceptable, and I'm sure some people may even welcome the high-level-looking code [1] that Rust and C++ support, but I think t…
> Rust is without a doubt a (much) "better C++" but I'm not sure a better C++ is necessarily what systems programming needs most.
I agree but if better C++ is what the PL industry can give me, then I'll take it, thank you very much!
(Frankly at this point I'll take anything that isn't C++...)
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#56Rust is a great language if you use for what was intended, system programming and as safe substitute of C and C++. But it's not the answer of everything, to me it's nowadays abused in a lot of projects, there are instances of project where using Rust not only doesn't make a lot of sense but also can be slower than another languages, there are cases where Go is better, other where Node.js is better, other where Python…
> To me the Rust community seems to want to argue that everything should be rewritten in Rust
I haven't seen this. At most, I've seen the push for rewriting important libraries where security is a core issue in Rust. I don't blame them. I'm tired of C/C++ being used everywhere because of performance, leading to the current-day situation of so much fundamentally unsafe code running the world.
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#57It's a programming language and it's not popular.
Any day now, it's going to overtake Logo on the TIOBE index. You just wait.
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that Rust's approach to safety -- soundly eliminate UB in safe code -- comes at the high cost of complexity. This affects how easy it is to write custom compilers (very important in the embedded space), but it is also not necessarily the best way to reduce bugs. For some, this cost is acceptable, and I'm sure some people may even welcome the high-level-looking code [1] that Rust and C++ support, but I think t…
> Rust is without a doubt a (much) "better C++" but I'm not sure a better C++ is necessarily what systems programming needs most. I agree but if better C++ is what the PL industry can give me, then I'll take it, thank you very much! (Frankly at this point I'll take anything that isn't C++...)
There are alternatives that more appeal to my taste in the works. Given the cost of changing language, any language, I'll wait and see how they turn out before making decisions.
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#59Rust is a great language if you use for what was intended, system programming and as safe substitute of C and C++. But it's not the answer of everything, to me it's nowadays abused in a lot of projects, there are instances of project where using Rust not only doesn't make a lot of sense but also can be slower than another languages, there are cases where Go is better, other where Node.js is better, other where Python…
OK, I will bite. If I had to come up with a case where Python is better than Rust, I would say with rapid prototyping and scientific computing. If you just want to try a few things out, python has faster development cycle and if you want to do some super clever math python has better library support. With a bit more mind stretching, I can make a case for Go with a bit more mind stretching. If you want to write a mass…
Ecosystem..
I don't know about node. But there's whole lot of java code and libraries out there. Otherwise why would people build other languages for the JVM?
Ease of writing; Most of code is okay having a GC. But time to produce working code (not necessarily 100% correct code) is important.
Rust is created for low level stuff. It is wrong to expect web backend programmers to deal with ownership, stack-vs-heap and all.
Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I doubt that we'll see it used for low-power/resource-constrained firmware I'm curious what your reasoning is for saying this?
Are you going to use Rust on a PIC12 with 32 bytes of data memory and max 256 code instructions? Of course not. Assembly is still king in this low-powered embedded class and will stay as such for the foreseeable future.
At the 10 year horizon the grandparent was using, the ultra low end of MCU may be substantially more powerful, with possibly lowend AM or RISC V being the smallest thing you can find. At some point, packaging will dominate cost over silicon for such small MCU so a better silicon won't cost much more...