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Why scientists are turning to Rust

nature.com

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Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#31

Post by walleeee »

whymauri wrote: post #23
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…

>I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialized 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. I think it's really field-dependent. I know academics/profs in the computational biology space that accumulate a looot of software over time from their colleagues/students. Also, it's not the scientists/PIs writ…

Yes. And a lot of that software collects dust after the paper it produced is published :/

Academia needs to recognize and incentivize software (including maintenance) as a research output, and make funding available for more research software engineers.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#32

Post by 7thaccount »

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…

I'm also highly sceptical. In my experience scientific software is mostly restricted to:

C, C++, Fortran, Python, R, Matlab/Simulink, Mathematica, Julia, and Excel.

I would think VERY few doing numerical computing or statistical or other engineering computations would have the bandwidth to really dive into Rust. I also wouldn't consider it stable enough for many projects (although I'm sure it's fine for some).

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#34

Post by kgarten »

tormeh wrote: post #14
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.

Thanks for the warning. I have the weekend, I will probably just do 1-2 Plots.

I program C, C++, matlab, Python and Ruby. Just looked a bit into Julia and Haskell.

Language Lover ... also trying not so common languages (my favourite is still OpenDylan).

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#35

Post by proverbialbunny »

7thaccount wrote: post #32
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…

I'm also highly sceptical. In my experience scientific software is mostly restricted to: C, C++, Fortran, Python, R, Matlab/Simulink, Mathematica, Julia, and Excel. I would think VERY few doing numerical computing or statistical or other engineering computations would have the bandwidth to really dive into Rust. I also wouldn't consider it stable enough for many projects (although I'm sure it's fine for some).

Rust is easier than C++ for this kind of work because of its packages. In some ways Rust is closer to Python for prototyping an idea to see if it works. Rust gets challenging when you have to deal with large systems, which is not a problem for research.

Researchers / scientists will sometimes not even write functions. It's that small of a scope.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#36

Post by johncolanduoni »

brundolf wrote: post #17
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/hete…

I’ve done simulation work using Rust and in particular the Rayon data-parallelism library and this has been my experience. The kind of organization of data you need to do for good cache behavior (e.g. split data by phases of algorithm, divide work by memory destination and only randomly read when possible) meshes quite well with the borrow checker restrictions.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#37

Post by sida »

walleeee wrote: post #31
whymauri wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialized 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. I think it's really field-dependent. I know academics/profs in the computational biology space that accumulate a looot of software over time from their colleagues/students. Also, it's not the scientists/PIs writ…

Yes. And a lot of that software collects dust after the paper it produced is published :/ Academia needs to recognize and incentivize software (including maintenance) as a research output, and make funding available for more research software engineers.

Do these software collect dust and rust over time?

ok sorry.. bad dad joke..

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#38

Post by adamnemecek »

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.

Which part of Julia is difficult?

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#39

Post by walleeee »

sida wrote: post #37
walleeee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And a lot of that software collects dust after the paper it produced is published :/ Academia needs to recognize and incentivize software (including maintenance) as a research output, and make funding available for more research software engineers.

Do these software collect dust and rust over time? ok sorry.. bad dad joke..

wish I'd thought of that...
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