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Why scientists are turning to Rust

nature.com

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Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#11

Post by st1x7 »

This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it.

> Köster, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, was looking for a language that offered the “expressiveness” of Python but the speed of languages such as C and C++.

Rust doesn't have the expressiveness of Python (even when you put expressiveness in quotes), it's not even close. What you're looking for is probably Julia (and Julia is already quite a bit more difficult than Python even if the syntax looks superficially similar).

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#14

Post by tormeh »

kgarten wrote: post #6

I work in hci research and have never played with/ heard of Rust being used. Was quickly checking for visualisation libraries and found https://lib.rs/visualization Loved the Color scheme and font ... lol. Anyways, will be using Rust for a small side project (short paper for augmented Humans ( https://augmented-humans.org/ deadline in 2 weeks :) let’s see how quickly I can learn it). Any tutorial recommendations go u…

> deadline in 2 weeks

That's.. ambitious. Rust is a nice language, but the borrow checker, for all its awesomeness, has a fairly steep learning curve. Unless you're a C++ programmer, in which case this level of thinking won't be totally alien to you at least.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#15

Post by Junk_Collector »

triska wrote: post #2

Rust is a very compelling environment for many kinds of scientific computing, also due to the features noted in the article: “Unlike the many compilers and ancillary utilities that programmers use to build C code, Rustaceans can use a single tool, called Cargo, to compile Rust code, run tests, auto-generate documentation, upload a package to a repository and more. It also downloads and installs third-party packages a…

It's really better than that. Cargo lets you specify the version of the package that you are using/used. This is a huge deal for getting something to run later and for reproducibility.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#16

Post by adamnemecek »

st1x7 wrote: post #11

This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…

Scientists will write whatever makes most sense. Julia is comparably easy as python it’s just that it has more advanced features.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#17

Post by brundolf »

st1x7 wrote: post #11

This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…

Most of Rust's difficulty comes from the borrow-checker. And if you're mostly doing linear work, if you're doing a lot of math, if you have a lot of pretty flat data structures, if you mostly keep things on the stack, then you may not run up against the borrow-checker that often. I would assume (I don't know for sure) that scientific computing tends to do more of this kind of stuff, and not as much heap-juggling/heterogeneous data modeling as, say, a web server.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#18

Post by st1x7 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #16
st1x7 wrote: post #11

This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…

Scientists will write whatever makes most sense. Julia is comparably easy as python it’s just that it has more advanced features.

It's considerably more difficult than Python, people just get misled by the similar syntax. The advanced features that you're mentioning aren't optional in Julia, especially if you care about performance.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#19

Post by dnautics »

st1x7 wrote: post #18
adamnemecek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists will write whatever makes most sense. Julia is comparably easy as python it’s just that it has more advanced features.

It's considerably more difficult than Python, people just get misled by the similar syntax. The advanced features that you're mentioning aren't optional in Julia, especially if you care about performance.

But you don't care about performance with Julia. You just write your thing. Then you complain to the community that it's slow, and they optimize it for you! Only half kidding.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#20

Post by ageofwant »

Scientist are not turning to rust. Scientist, if they are turning, are turning to the scientific standard compute language and its plethora of platforms and libraries: Python.

Rust is fine, but it will never catch up or replace Python. Python is just good enough at what it does and will only become better.

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