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Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

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Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#111

Post by chrismorgan »

johnfn wrote: post #75
_-___________-_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s the sort of thing where you often use another language suitable for hot reloading for such customisation or rapid-feedback alteration. As a couple of examples I’m aware of:

• The Azul GUI toolkit uses CSS for styling of its widgets, and hot-reloads stylesheets.

• The Mun programming language is designed for the sort of niche Lua is often used, with hot-reloading scripting-like functionality to augment your Rust code. (Well, Rust is the main host language at present, anyway.)

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#112

Post by kibwen »

thepratt wrote: post #98
jph wrote: post #6

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…

Does having to develop against rust nightly over stable not worry you when attempting to productionize a service? I understand new features get shipped behind feature flags/language pragmas, but it seems like a massive looming risk.

Not that as of Rust 1.45, coming out this Thursday, Rocket will be able to target stable Rust: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/issues/19#issuecomme...

I believe Diesel has been on stable for a long time now, so for this use case I don't think anyone will need to worry about using the nightly releases.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#113

Post by tegeek »

pjmlp wrote: post #107
tegeek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's spot on. I mostly work with C#, F# in a day to day job and I build my code only a few times. This is also true when I work with Java, Angular and TypeScript. When I pick a new feature to implement I design that on paper with pencil and then mostly translate that to code. Mostly I can code for hours without compiling since this is where Typed Languages have strength.

Try to do design GUIs without compiling. :)

I agree that whenever I've to "adjust" something in HTML, CSS, its always a struggle with multiple tries and write-run-write-run cycle. But again, this has nothing to do with how you design and write code in a static language.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#114

Post by dleslie »

johnfn wrote: post #75
_-___________-_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unity build times on a huge project aren't hot, either; particularly when you must build a client to test.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#115

Post by brabel »

johnfn wrote: post #48
wiz21c wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

With Jetbrains IDEs (IntelliJ, Webstorm, CLion) you can run a "sketch" that can "see" any module in your project. I use that a lot in Java/Groovy/Kotlin/Rust and it feels much superior to a REPL because I can write not just one-liners, but larger amounts of code, with all the features of the IDE like auto-completion, inline docs, syntax checking etc.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#116

Post by csomar »

I'm working with Rust as a backend right now and can echo the Diesel experience. The issue is that there is not really much of a choice, it is either Diesel or not. So you have to stick with that. Another problem is that most OS projects in Rust are maintained by 1-2 persons who are not working on the project fulltime. That's not the case for JavaScript/Node as there are order of magnitudes more projects and people working in these platforms.

His last example could be improved a lot with the "?" keyword. That would remove lots of wrapping and simplify the code greatly. So it's not that bad really.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#117

Post by flohofwoe »

byteofbits wrote: post #39
johnfn wrote: post #30

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,…

As a datapoint for your hypothesis, when working in a typed language I will build my code only a few times a day. I much prefer working from a logical and thoughtful approach rather than iteration. At the point where I start a build I am already reasonably confident that it will do what I want it to. There are some bugs where I will need to re-build several times consecutively but these are relatively rare for me (I…

As a counterpoint, I'm mostly working in typed, compiled languages, and I compile and debug-step through my changes in much smaller increments (usually a couple of minutes). But this only works because part of the work is to always fight 'compile time bloat'.

It is easy to let a project slowly slide into a state where this workflow is no longer possible, especially in high-level languages like modern C++ or Rust, when even incremental builds take so long that it throws you out of "flow".

But anyway, I think this sort of working style doesn't have to do with a language's type system, but is a personal choice and one isn't necessarily better than the other, but certain personalities might be attracted to certain language communities, and thus directly influence priorities (e.g. a large part of the 'modern C++' community seems to think that compilation time and good runtime performance in debug builds are not high priorities, which from my point-of-view is entirely irrational).

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#118

Post by pjmlp »

tegeek wrote: post #113
pjmlp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to do design GUIs without compiling. :)

I agree that whenever I've to "adjust" something in HTML, CSS, its always a struggle with multiple tries and write-run-write-run cycle. But again, this has nothing to do with how you design and write code in a static language.

Sure it does, for example in SSR frameworks, you want the HTML template engine or UI designer to see those components.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#119

Post by zozbot234 »

saurik wrote: post #103
johnfn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I am with you in the camp that cares about compile times. I use C++, I care deeply about compile-time correctness (and have "as close as I can get to rust as I can" abstractions for tons of things such a small locks, but then take advantage of the almost-dependent typing provided by C++ to go even further than you can in rust to prove correctness of my buffers), and I envy people who get to code in Haskell or I…

> "I would rather never have to type a prototype than save any time compiling" and "I would rather my build system never have to consider dependency management than save any time compiling" and "I would rather provide the highest possible quality resulting binary than save any time compiling"

Rust outputs prototype information in .rmeta artifacts that are generated as one of the first steps in compilation, so this is not a compile-time issue. AFAICT, dependencies are also tracked, and debug vs. release switches are provided that also control things like binary optimization.

The real "problem" for compile times in Rust is that Rust makes it idiomatic to write code that's slower to compile. That's really all there is to it. If you were to literally write Rust like it's C, you'd find that there's no real overhead introduced by Rust per se.

(This is not to say that improvement is not possible, of course. Even what's "idiomatic" can be tweaked over time to reduce the amount of excessive, duplicated work that the build system has to do. Newer features like const generics will probably make this feasible in the future, and improvements in the compile workflow itself will do the rest.)

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#120

Post by rob74 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #106
pdr2020 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is much too low level for most glue/web services. Unless you have a specific high performance requirement (and Go doesn't meet this), there's no real strong case for migration here.

Rust itself is not inherently "low level" per se. But others are probably right that the whole web services ecosystem for Rust is rather half-baked at this time, the OP notwithstanding.

Actually the OP only wrote that the current state of the ecosystem is surprisingly mature, but he doesn't recommend writing anything serious in it yet.

Personally I don't see the point to implement a typical web application in Rust - the performance improvements you get will be lost on IO-bound applications, but you'll still be saddled with the complexity of the memory management. I'd rather suggest to rewrite VS Code or the Slack client in Rust (i.e. apps which currently use Web technologies on the desktop) - those would definitely benefit more from increased performance and reduced memory footprint...

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