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Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

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Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#231

Post by andrewmcwatters »

steveklabnik wrote: post #223
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh very cool. Maybe I should spend some more time looking into those. Thanks for pointing that out!

No problem. Some links to get you started: * https://crates.io/crates/bindgen (generate Rust FFI from headers) * https://crates.io/crates/cbindgen (the inverse of bindgen) * https://cxx.rs/ (a similar tool to bindgen, newer)

That's it right there. You may have just won me over by pointing these out. It's just so hard to go back to writing bindings mostly by hand instead of the other way around. I've generated thousands of bindings for all sorts of things, so it's really critical to my work.

Thanks again, Steve. And for all your patience, too.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#232

Post by falcolas »

k__ wrote: post #214
falcolas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meme of the Rust Evangalism Strikeforce exists for a reason - because a person can't say anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust without getting dogpiled and downvoted into oblivion. The Rust community has proven itself, outside of the Rust specific forums, to be exceptionally elitist. And, as shown in a sibling thread, the founders of Rust are right there on the dogpile attacking the character and dissectin…

Most of the time, it's about people wanting to make rude remarks and less about them saying "anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust" .

A mature community's response to trolling is not "dogpile on them until they realize they're wrong", and is instead "ignore the troll".

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#233

Post by itwy »

jfengel wrote: post #170
gibolt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These insights are a snapshot, not a trend line. Java can be in rapid decline and still be at the top of the list. Changing acceleration, not position, is how you make a comeback. Java is currently losing Android devs to Kotlin. That could cause a precipitous drop in direct usage in the coming years.

Despite some surface differences, Kotlin and Java are so similar that "losing" one to the other isn't really that big a change. They run on the same platforms and they use the same frameworks, dependencies, debuggers, and other tooling. A Java developer will pick up Kotlin much faster than, say, a Postgres developer will pick up Mongo. It takes a lot longer for a Java programmer to learn the Android environment than…

There's no such thing as Postgres or Mongo developer. They are not programming languages.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#234

Post by steveklabnik »

falcolas wrote: post #229
steveklabnik wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the conclusion that many people just project whatever they want onto these kinds of conversations, positive and negative. For example, in my comment, I very much said "made it seem" and suggested that maybe people were misunderstanding the poster, not attacking their character. Many people post many negative things about Rust, including those who are its most fervent advocates. But the gray areas mean th…

"made it seem" "suggested" "misunderstanding" Polite or not, using "soft" words or not, attacking the character of someone – "[you're not] interested in having a real discussion", "[you only want] a specific kind of description from a specific kind of person" – does Rust, and its community, absolutely no favors. > Many people post many negative things about Rust And I have no doubt that you'll continue to be there, "…

This is exactly what I mean. I don't see how saying "hey this statement came across a little insulting and that's probably why people got a bit aggro" is attacking someone's character. There's nothing to do with someone's character in there, at all.

I myself post negative things about Rust, including in this thread. Heck in the last week I've told the story about a team I was on not choosing Rust and how I thought that was a good decision in like, three different threads between here and Reddit.

I doubt we will ever agree though, so I'll leave it at that.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#235

Post by vaylian »

dcgudeman wrote: post #173
nicoburns wrote: post #4

I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.

Why do you think it has anything to do with Mozilla layoffs?

Because some high-profile Rust developers are available for hire again.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#236

Post by andrewmcwatters »

steveklabnik wrote: post #220
falcolas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meme of the Rust Evangalism Strikeforce exists for a reason - because a person can't say anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust without getting dogpiled and downvoted into oblivion. The Rust community has proven itself, outside of the Rust specific forums, to be exceptionally elitist. And, as shown in a sibling thread, the founders of Rust are right there on the dogpile attacking the character and dissectin…

I've come to the conclusion that many people just project whatever they want onto these kinds of conversations, positive and negative. For example, in my comment, I very much said "made it seem" and suggested that maybe people were misunderstanding the poster, not attacking their character. Many people post many negative things about Rust, including those who are its most fervent advocates. But the gray areas mean th…

I appreciate your comments here for multiple reasons and will not forget them. Thanks for taking the time to talk, it really sets a great example, too.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#237

Post by mynameisash »

cogman10 wrote: post #77
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #50

Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town. Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in…

I can give you a few reason you might like rust. - Instant boot time. Because rust is statically compiled, there's no runtime startup or anything involved with it. From dead to alive is pretty much instant. - Low memory footprint. Because rust does not use a GC, it doesn't need all the bits and pieces of memory storage that modern GCs require. The memory allocated is (close to) the minimal memory needed to run the ap…

> The model model not only makes memory safe, it prevents different types of concurrency bugs. While rust won't prevent ALL classes of concurrency issues, it will prevent several of them. That makes it easier to write parallel applications.

Bringing data to this discussion, many of the big tech companies have found that ~70% of CVEs are due to memory bugs (free after use, double free, etc.)[0], and these are prevented by Rust's model.

[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/16/a-proactive-appro...

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#238

Post by andrewmcwatters »

smt88 wrote: post #176
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've basically had nothing but downvotes from the Rust community because any time I point something out about my thoughts on the language, I'm wrong and can't have those thoughts. Some one here in a separate thread said, "I don't understand your hate," and I'm like, what hate? It's a programming language. I don't hate it, I just don't yet find a reason to use it, but maybe I'm missing something really big. It's not r…

People are downvoting you because you're writing things that are: - factually wrong (revealing you don't know very basic info about Rust) - anecdotal - inflammatory (as you yourself admit when you say your comments were "crude") It's not that people are being fanboys. I see lots of non-downvoted comments about not wanting to use Rust. Look at any HN thread about Zig, and you'll see a ton of non-grey comments that say…

Could you reconsider downvoting people who don't know about something and have a legitimate curiosity? It makes HN a really off-putting place to post.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#239

Post by andrewmcwatters »

steveklabnik wrote: post #205
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Rust can be the language where I force myself to get used to them. In C++ there are stilly plenty of alternatives to not having to use templates. The reason I ask is I've preferred not to use them because I find them slightly more demanding to read. I think that's just a personal bias I need to get over.

Yeah you're not alone. Have you used concepts at all yet? Rust's generics are similar to, but different than, C++ templates generally; concepts is the closest thing C++ has to them. That being said, even when you understand them, you can create some monstrosities, just like C++. To connect it back to your original questions, Rust relies heavily on generics because if you want runtime performance, but you also want sa…

I haven't spent any time in C++20, so it's interesting to hear that. I'll try and read more about both. Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Re: Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help

#240

Post by jfengel »

itwy wrote: post #233
jfengel wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite some surface differences, Kotlin and Java are so similar that "losing" one to the other isn't really that big a change. They run on the same platforms and they use the same frameworks, dependencies, debuggers, and other tooling. A Java developer will pick up Kotlin much faster than, say, a Postgres developer will pick up Mongo. It takes a lot longer for a Java programmer to learn the Android environment than…

There's no such thing as Postgres or Mongo developer. They are not programming languages.

They are tools used by programmers. They do, in fact, have languages of their own, but more to the point they have whole ecosystems of expected behaviors, idioms, best practices, etc etc etc. Those take longer to learn than a programming language.

Similarly, "web app" isn't a programming language, and neither is "server side". But they are toolkits that a developer must learn on top of their programming language, and it takes longer than the actual language itself.

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