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What is Rust and why is it so popular?

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Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#211

Post by steveklabnik »

clktmr wrote: post #209

As an embedded systems engineer I have very mixed feelings about Rust. There are a lot of things to like, but Rust seems to miss the point why C++ didn't replace C and will fail at that for the same reasons. I wish for an economic, unexciting, conservative evolution of C, which I don't see in Rust. I could imagine C++ being replaced by Rust, though I don't think borrow checking is the future of programming. Another p…

Just so you know, there's tools that let you check the entire set of licenses of your dependency tree, and whitelist/blacklist them. Amazon implemented one after they started using Rust more seriously.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#212

Post by jane_red »

steveklabnik wrote: post #205
janered wrote: post #190

Still not hyped. The article does not show anything special or new about the language that would attract me personally. Type inference -- nothing new and exists in many other languages. Actually how about compile type inference not only in function bodies? :) Functional niceness with iterators -- also nothing new. It can be even more succinct and elegant in Scala for example. But Scala is not as fast you'd say! Yeah,…

> Actually how about compile type inference not only in function bodies? This is actually an explicit design decision; it means that the analysis is tractable, and that you don't get spooky-at-a-distance error messages.

Hmm, I see. It makes sense.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#213

Post by throwaway894345 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #148
throwaway894345 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is great and I'm really glad it exists; however, I'm skeptical that anyone ever "gets up to Python speed" or "gets up to Go speed", at least provided "speed" means "time to an acceptable result" and not "time to perfect" or "time to pacifying rustc". It's a laudable aim, but I don't think we're close. There's still a lot that Rust makes you think about that Python/Go/etc don't, such as memory management and life…

I feel like these days, provided there’s a library and I’m not writing stuff from scratch, I’m just as fast at Rust as I am with Ruby. I spent way more time debugging Ruby problems and fixing bugs than I pay upfront with Rust. It really depends on how you measure productivity. But also, I don’t think that “makes you think about memory” is that simple. I don’t have to think about memory in Rust very often at all: that…

Fully agree about "depends on how you measure"--that's kind of my thesis. If you're willing to trade iteration velocity to gain correctness, I would seriously consider Rust, but probably not if the value proposition was inverted.

> But also, I don’t think that “makes you think about memory” is that simple. I don’t have to think about memory in Rust very often at all: that’s what the compiler is for! When I make a mistake, it corrects me, and I’ve only thought about it for a few moments.

Ok, you don't think about it, but the back-and-forth with the compiler still takes a nonzero amount of time that you don't have to deal with in a GC language. At least not until you start to hit upon GC performance issues, at which point the value proposition shifts in Rust's favor, which ultimately brings me back to my point about it being an issue of tradeoffs and my skepticism about Rust-as-silver-bullet.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#214

Post by kibwen »

steveklabnik wrote: post #25
lordleft wrote: post #13

The example of an error message in the blog post is the kind of thing that makes me seriously consider trying out rust. It's excellent. Are most rust error messages like that?

Most of them are, yes. Some of them are not. We treat bad error messages as bugs, and track them, and have a few dedicated contributors working to make them better all the time.

Worth noting that Rust tries to set a high bar for error messages, so not just bad, but even pretty-okay-but-could-be-better error messages also get tracked as bugs. As a result, 1/6th of all open bugs in the Rust issue tracker are "diagnostics" (i.e. error messages) bugs, making it the single largest category (AFAIK): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#215

Post by jane_red »

qaq wrote: post #195
janered wrote: post #190

Still not hyped. The article does not show anything special or new about the language that would attract me personally. Type inference -- nothing new and exists in many other languages. Actually how about compile type inference not only in function bodies? :) Functional niceness with iterators -- also nothing new. It can be even more succinct and elegant in Scala for example. But Scala is not as fast you'd say! Yeah,…

"It is a niche feature" looking at C and C++ usage that niche is pretty huge.

It is, and C/C++ are used in so many areas which are not system programming right? Being a scientific Python backbone is one of them for example. My claim was that it is nothing out-of-ordinary. In fact, I really dislike the article's somewhat evangelist attempt to target newbies. These so-called benefits existed and do exist in so many other languages. The only thing that Rust comes with is memory safety which on closer look is actually an illusion and is a pretty evil one. I would praise Rust for speed, yes. For ecosystem, yes. But that's it.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#216

Post by marcosdumay »

pron wrote: post #39
ChrisSD wrote: post #4

I think one of the biggest benefits of Rust is it bakes in static analysis of code as a first class feature. Which means the language is amenable to analysis and you don't have to use third party tools to benefit from it. I also like some of the abstractions. They're clever in their simplicity. For example, an iterator over an array or vector is simply doing a for loop using pointers.

Yes and no. It provides some kinds of (important!) static analysis out of the box, but at the cost of complexity, which directly adversely affects some other kinds of (also important) static analysis. For example, there are sound static analysis tools that guarantee no undefined behavior of C code, but AFAIK, such tools can at best only work on a subset of C++, because of its complexity. Rust goes all out on eliminat…

Hum... UB is a huge source of analysis complexity. If are not comparing it with an insanely restrictive dialect of C (that will bring a lot of code complexity by itself), or I will love to see those static analysis tools that are better than Rust's.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#217

Post by pron »

devit wrote: post #149
pron wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Zig is the one I like, and IMO it's a language that shows an interesting yet very simple model for what systems programming can be. But I'll admit that it's easier to look good before you're put to the test in the field, so I'll wait and see what becomes of it.

As far as I can tell Zig is equivalent to a subset of C++ and thus completely lacks all the guarantees that Rust provides and several of the features that C++ has; so there is no point to use it instead of those languages.

If you prefer languages with more features, then simple languages aren't for you. But me? If you told me you'd give me language X but with far fewer features, my eyes would light up, and I'd only ask, are you sure you can't get rid of any more? As Saint-Exupery said, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Zig has all you need to write clear, efficient, generic, systems code and nothing more, but also nothing less. It is also intended to help you write safe code, but it goes about it differently from Rust.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#218

Post by vperez »

sdegutis wrote: post #204
shepmaster wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are quite welcome! I can't add much to the Haskell part as I've only ever used it sparingly. In many aspects, I view Rust as only having one or two small things that are new (or at least new in a non-research programming language). Its big strength is combining a lot of existing good ideas in a principled manner.

I’d agree, basically Haskell is focused on academic purity and abstract experimentation while Rust is focused on being equally practical and innovative at the same time.

Haskell is actually used by companies to solve practical problems, a non trivial example being Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78

Not too bad for an abstract experimentation.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#219

Post by pron »

marcosdumay wrote: post #216
pron wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. It provides some kinds of (important!) static analysis out of the box, but at the cost of complexity, which directly adversely affects some other kinds of (also important) static analysis. For example, there are sound static analysis tools that guarantee no undefined behavior of C code, but AFAIK, such tools can at best only work on a subset of C++, because of its complexity. Rust goes all out on eliminat…

Hum... UB is a huge source of analysis complexity. If are not comparing it with an insanely restrictive dialect of C (that will bring a lot of code complexity by itself), or I will love to see those static analysis tools that are better than Rust's.

They're not "better" than Rust (I'm not even sure what that means), but they're cheaper, and that's why they're more popular. I'm referring to Trust-in-Soft (the people behind Frama-C) and some other similar tools, although I now see that TiS say they support all of C++11.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#220

Post by byt143 »

locust98 wrote: post #180
adamnemecek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now switch to Julia instead of Python/matlab and you have a really solid stack.

Julia lost its momentum, and for good reasons: insuficient or rushed up libraries, no option for the generation of standalone executables and general overselling (by the way, bashing Python at every opportunity didn't lead to a higher volume of users)

Not sure the data supports that ,: https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2020/01/06/january-newslette...
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