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Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#141

Post by zRedShift »

westicecoast32 wrote: post #136
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

Really? I find that rust is worse than C++ thanks to clang For example, is there a way in rust to get a runtime error when there's an int overflow?

Of course. rustc has the "-C overflow-checks" flag. Cargo turns it on by default for debug builds. To turn it on for release builds, just put "overflow-checks = true" in the [profile.release] section of your Cargo.toml.

Or better yet, the Rust standard library exposes all the relevant LLVM intrinsics for the primitives, so you have the {Integer}::checked_, {Integer}::saturating_, {Integer}::wrapping_, {Integer}::overflowing_ (inlined) functions to do all your integer math in an error-free fashion.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#142

Post by DarmokJalad1701 »

mrfusion wrote: post #39
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.

As a datapoint/anecdote, I work in an autonomous vehicle company and we have adopted Rust extensively in our codebase in the last six months or so.

Previously, the code base was primarily Python with some C++. Now there is a significant chunk of code, particularly related to safety, written in Rust.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#143

Post by zucker42 »

tastyminerals2 wrote: post #78
thomastjeffery wrote: post #4

The syntax is nicer. Granted, I'm not very familiar with D. I didn't even know it had a borrow checker. Rust took a lot of great features from Haskell, while keeping itself reasonably approachable from a C/C++/D/Java programmer's perspective. Rust put type names after variable/function/parameter names, which really cleans up the syntax nicely. Rust has very nice syntax for pattern matching, monads, and a slew of othe…

One of the reasons why I haven't approached Rust is its syntax. Subjectively ugly and polluted with punctuation symbols that tell you little about their semantics. D looks cleaner and more readable even for a person not familiar with the language. D's readability is on par with scripting languages. Rust is far away from that. Type names after variable or before? When you think about declaring a variable, do you think…

> When you think about declaring a variable, do you think about its type of name first?

I completely disagree with your opinion on this subject, though I recognize that it's mostly subjective. I think types after the variable are completely better except for my muscle memory from C.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#144

Post by CDSlice »

tastyminerals2 wrote: post #78
thomastjeffery wrote: post #4

The syntax is nicer. Granted, I'm not very familiar with D. I didn't even know it had a borrow checker. Rust took a lot of great features from Haskell, while keeping itself reasonably approachable from a C/C++/D/Java programmer's perspective. Rust put type names after variable/function/parameter names, which really cleans up the syntax nicely. Rust has very nice syntax for pattern matching, monads, and a slew of othe…

One of the reasons why I haven't approached Rust is its syntax. Subjectively ugly and polluted with punctuation symbols that tell you little about their semantics. D looks cleaner and more readable even for a person not familiar with the language. D's readability is on par with scripting languages. Rust is far away from that. Type names after variable or before? When you think about declaring a variable, do you think…

The nice thing about Rust is you often don’t have to declare the type of a variable since the compiler will just infer it for you. This is especially nice in an IDE like CLion which will show you the inferred type for each variable. As for the syntax for a type declaration, `variable: Type` is more natural and readable for me than `type variable`. The first one naturally reads as `variable is a Type` while the second reads like Yoda speak (`A Type, variable is`)

Since I am not familiar with Scalia, I am not sure why the types after the name would end up being more verbose, as far as I can tell the only difference is the : between the variable and its type. Would you mind expanding on that?

Personally although Rust definitely does not have the elegance of Haskell or Python, I definitely would not call it ugly. There aren’t that many symbols and once you actually spend the time to learn the language the semantics for each syntax element are pretty easy to remember. I also have looked at D, but the lack of algebraic data types makes it a non-starter for me.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#145

Post by adamnemecek »

papaf wrote: post #99
nindalf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Could you give a few examples of libraries that can’t be made in Rust due to lack of abstraction compared to C++? GUI libraries apart, I can’t think of anything offhand. 2. True, but growth curves are rarely linear. Here’s a rough proxy on users - the number of subscribers to /r/rust - https://subredditstats.com/r/Rust . Look at the growth between 2014-18 and 2018-2020. You’re extrapolating on current growth rate,…

1. Could you give a few examples of libraries that can’t be made in Rust due to lack of abstraction compared to C++? I'm guessing, but I think that something like Armadillo[1] would not be possible on stable Rust. Something like Catch[2] might also difficult to make ergonomic. I don't program in C++ anymore and I would personally live with the lack of expression/abstraction for a safer language though. [1] http://arm…

Why are they impossible in Rust? Are you aware of Rust's macros right?

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#146

Post by adamnemecek »

Kaze404 wrote: post #128
tluyben2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a C++-killer: same strengths, none of the weaknesses Not used Rust yet, used a lot of C++; isn't a weakness that it also is extremely slow in compiling? Not sure about others but to me that's a big weakness (if it still applies, but as far as I can find on Google it does).

From my experience building (not writing) relatively complex Rust applications like Alacritty, it's really not that bad. Building for release is definitely slower than C++, but development builds are almost always instant for me, as they're done incrementally.

Rust is much better at caching the intermediate results of compilation. First time compilation might take some time, recompilation will be faster though.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#148

Post by blub »

secondcoming wrote: post #75
ncmncm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

I've been writing C++ professionally for 16 years. I'm doing it right now in fact, but snuck on to HN while a build is underway. OP is right, unfortunately. C++ is a dying language. Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all looking at Rust. Why? Because it's probably makes more sense to rewrite a buggy C++ component in Rust instead of updating it to use modern C++ (where admittedly, you have to go out of your way to get…

The only language that one can honestly say that is dying (if not already dead) is VisualBasic. Perl and Delphi are probably going to continue to decline. Objective-C will be obsoleted by Swift some day, but is still relevant. Ruby's not too hot now, but far from dead AFAIK.

Other than that it's nonsense to say that X is dying.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#149

Post by secondcoming »

blub wrote: post #148
secondcoming wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing C++ professionally for 16 years. I'm doing it right now in fact, but snuck on to HN while a build is underway. OP is right, unfortunately. C++ is a dying language. Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all looking at Rust. Why? Because it's probably makes more sense to rewrite a buggy C++ component in Rust instead of updating it to use modern C++ (where admittedly, you have to go out of your way to get…

The only language that one can honestly say that is dying (if not already dead) is VisualBasic. Perl and Delphi are probably going to continue to decline. Objective-C will be obsoleted by Swift some day, but is still relevant. Ruby's not too hot now, but far from dead AFAIK. Other than that it's nonsense to say that X is dying.

C++ is being blamed for allowing people to write buggy, insecure programs. In my mind, that's different to just becoming unpopular; it's dying because it's too dangerous and too complicated.

Sure, it'll stick around for some years yet but all those jobs will become maintenance jobs. Very little greenfield projects will elect to use it outside of niche areas (games and maybe embedded - UK salaries for embedded dev are terrible). Both C++ and Rust can use LLVM, so the generated code is likely to be the same.

If you were starting a greenfield project today why would you choose to do it in C++?

I forgot to mention Go too.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#150

Post by setr »

_bxg1 wrote: post #129
timw4mail wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. While there is a growing set of web-based application for Rust, it's not like PHP, where the very purpose of the language is the web. Rust is a system language before it is a web language. WASM as a target is actually a great indication that it's a system language -- performance is a primary consideration.

You're missing the point. The point is that Rust came from Mozilla . Its mind-share started with web people and is expanding from there. What I'm trying to get across is that those social forces can matter more for adoption than just the tech's appropriateness, considered in a vacuum.

In that case, it came from Mozilla for working on a web browser, with primary goals of security, building sandboxes & language runtimes (js), and replacing an application-level cross-platform C++ core.

Which is very different than "web people", which in my mind implies webdev -- html/css/js + API server/db/caching backend.

Which also further explains why WASM is so far along (sandbox, security), much better than any association with webdev itself; but not kernel-level system development. (But if the web browser is an userspace OS... then it's probably not that far from it)

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