Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

stu2b50.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 352 posts

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#161

Post by imtringued »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #32
Elinvynia wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it provide the same/better safety guarantees as Rust? The website has extremely limited information about the language.

I can't confirm what is the motivation behind Ada++, but actual Ada2012 standard and in particular the Ada SPARK (2014) subset is in many ways objectively superior to Rust with regards to memory safety. One major issue with Ada is that commercial grade compilers are not cheap and for the most part the language was unable to get rid of the stereotype of being an Aerospace/Defense language only. Some discussion on the…

Does Ada have a substructural type system [0]? If not, then it's not even in the same league as Rust.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substructural_type_system

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#162

Post by Akronymus »

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…

I am in a completely different environment than you, but for desktop dev, I need to recompile constantly to verify alignment of usercontrols and such.

So, for my workflow relatively fast compile times are mandatory.

(Altough, I really wanna get out of desktop dev.)

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#163

Post by ardfard »

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.

Have you try Haskell? The most used compiler, GHC, shipped with it's own REPL and it's quite good. Something I missed when coding in Rust.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#164

Post by entha_saava »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #97
bluecmd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build systems usually don't care what you added. Modification of source means rebuild.

Yes, but the programmer knows what they added, and I was asking why they wanted to build again if all they added was a comment? If this was in a CI context then 10 seconds seems unimportant; compile times of 10 seconds are usually only complained about in the context of programmers who've gotten used to tiny edit-compile-test cycles.

In order to ensure the next rebuild on an actual code change doesn't need to compile this comment-changed file, I guess.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#165

Post by tabs_masterrace »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #20
Nican wrote: post #7

There is an advocate on our team that wants to migrate our web service from Nodejs to Rust. While I am not a huge fan of Typescript, at least libraries are readily available and generally easy to use. On the other hand, being able to show that we are able to do monitoring, user auditing, ORM, opentracing, gRPC-web with Rust is non trivial. Now that I think of it, being able to do a "hello world" on any language is pr…

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…

Swift / Vapor is amazing as well. They just released version 4, which streamlined and tidied up lots of things, can't recommend it enough. There's just something solid about Swift's strictness and compile time checks, that make it easy to be sure you're handling all possible code paths, and you can be reasonable confident it works and won't break all the time. Also very lean on dependencies, mostly unopinionated, and performance/mem-usage is top tier too. Only con is probably, you're bound to Xcode (and therefore macOS) for development, I guess you could try to set it up in VSCode, but haven't heard of it and experience will probably be not so good.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#166

Post by estsauver »

hellofunk wrote: post #136
estsauver wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the best solutions to that world right now seem to be things like lisps with dynamic typing added. You get a great set of repl support, but you can also build components and systems into easy wrapper scripts to load them as needed.

I assume you mean static typing enabled. Because lisps are already dynamically typed to begin with.

Thanks, I actually meant gradually typed systems, like rust typed or closure with heavy spec usage.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#167

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

Fiahil wrote: post #139
johnfn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying this from someone else I replied to: No, it's an issue for warm caches as well. 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. 10 seconds! For a few hundred lines! Maybe that doesn't sound insane, but extrapolating out, that's at least 100x worse than the languages that I'm used to.

If you were using `cargo run` or `cargo build` instead of `cargo check`, these 10 seconds could be spent in linking the final binary and not running the compiler frontend. for that matter 10 secs is not unheard of for large libraries with a lot of debug symbols. That's why you should use `cargo check` instead : it will only run the rust compiler frontend, but not the LLVM linker.

Cargo check does not help with what the parent is talking about, which is a edit-compile-run loop.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#168

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

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.

Having to care for memory management is by definition very low level.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#169

Post by murukesh_s »

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…

I have seen few, often genius programmers do that. but not everyone can have a mental map of the code like that. we just need to run and fix part by part.. may be it's matter of practice, but that's the way several programmers workflows are.

Re: Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language

#170

Post by fooyc »

It's sad that we still have to make async I/O explicit in the code to obtain some efficient concurrency in 2020.

Async/await is a huge improvement over callback hell, but this doesn't fix everything. The "function color" problem still exists [1], and seems to be more than binary in rust. This quote from the article is incredibly sad: "each async library, comes its own ecosystem of libraries, which only work with that async library".

Rust is ground breaking in some areas, but also completely lacks innovation in others.

But is it actually _necessary_ to resort to async I/O in Rust, given that the type system appears to make thread-based concurrency safe ?

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...

Post reply on HN