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I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust,…
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> The main thing that I use compiling for is to validate little off-by-one things. Like, is substring() exclusive on the second parameter? What about range syntax and the slice operator? What if I wrote + 1 instead of - 1 somewhere, or did I'm a really big fan of reading the docs (or, where the docs are insufficient, the source), and will always have docs.rs open alongside my editor. While the examples you provide ar…
Perhaps my examples were a little too trivial. I do a decent amount of game/graphics coding, so there's a lot of "hmm, does this look good 20 pixels over? How about 18?" and I don't know how you'd get around that without recompiling. (OK, you could read preferences from a file, but then you'd have to optimistically write every value you'd ever want to recompile to a file. I've tried this, but it's far too much overhe…
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Rewriting is very expensive, and the advocate will need to make a VERY strong case for Rust if they're asking your company to invest in replacing it - and alternatives have to be suggested as well, including other languages and a good list of things wrong with Node / TS. Consider developer availability as well. I don't think a strong enough argument can be made. I'm sure you CAN write web services in Rust, and that i…
What do you miss about java?
In my opinion, the section which the author called "the ugly" makes it clear that it's not that surprisingly good as a application server language. A file upload is a basic feature that has already been solved yet Rust code contains a lot of boilerplate when compared with Python. Remember the mantra from the 2010's when the dynamic typing craze? Rust is not about optimizing developer time, it's about guaranteeing saf…
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> The main thing that I use compiling for is to validate little off-by-one things. Like, is substring() exclusive on the second parameter? What about range syntax and the slice operator? What if I wrote + 1 instead of - 1 somewhere, or did I'm a really big fan of reading the docs (or, where the docs are insufficient, the source), and will always have docs.rs open alongside my editor. While the examples you provide ar…
Perhaps my examples were a little too trivial. I do a decent amount of game/graphics coding, so there's a lot of "hmm, does this look good 20 pixels over? How about 18?" and I don't know how you'd get around that without recompiling. (OK, you could read preferences from a file, but then you'd have to optimistically write every value you'd ever want to recompile to a file. I've tried this, but it's far too much overhe…
Why wouldn't you want a garbage collected language for developing web services? Developer time is at a premium, lots of RAM, likely a single environment managing multiple requests so the GC gets a global overview, and because of network variability you're unlikely to be doing anything with realtime constraints.
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> I had a 10 second compilation cycle to add a comment to a file in a project with a couple hundred lines of code and like 4 lines in my cargo.toml. Why compile again after adding a comment?
Build systems usually don't care what you added. Modification of source means rebuild.
I'm building with Rust, Rocket, Diesel, and agree with much of the original article. I can also add more: in my direct personal experience, the lead people creating Rocket and Diesel are superb about responsiveness, ongoing communication, and enabling people (e.g. me) to help diagnose issues and fix the them. I'm continually thankful for the quality of participation among the people in the ecosystem. On the technical…
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> I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. I used to be the same way, but the more I practiced holding the state in my head while I worked, the better I got at it. > One group loves fast compile times and quickly validating hypotheses. You just don't need it. As you make changes, the delta between expected behavior and actual behavior contin…
I've always wondered if the difference is the quality of work that we do. For instance, I do a lot of graphical/games stuff, and there's no resolution in my head high enough to know that 200 pixels to the right is too far (or not) without recompiling the app and actually looking at it. Or if that shade of blue is the right one. Still, I appreciate your optimism. I'll give it a shot! Especially for things that aren't…
For a contrast, I don't notice compile times at all in just about any language for the most part: when you reach the "few million lines of code" size, there's no language that is going to be instant; and for embedded/systems work, committing a change can involve things like creating builds for N different architectures and running a test suite that may have to control hardware [run times of the test suite are measured in hours to days]. At this scale, anything that the compiler catches, even if it takes an hour to compile, saves an order of magnitude more time later in the process.
It's legitimately a hard problem to design a language that works well for both projects in the few tens of thousands of lines of code size -- i.e. tossing together a quick prototype -- and scales to millions of lines of code or larger.
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>> in a normal day I'd probably average hundreds to a thousand compilation cycles! Maybe it's time to switch to an interpreter ? :-)
You mean a REPL, or an interpreted language? I'd love a REPL that could somehow load the state of my entire app so I could test stuff out, but I've never found a language that could do that and also had reasonable type safety guarantees.