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Why scientists are turning to Rust

nature.com

101–105 of 105 posts

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a chicken and egg scenario there really. A few early adopters will need to branch out and start using it to get that momentum building, which is probably a great opportunity for scientists who are looking for an alternative

I think this is exactly the point I was making. There isn’t a real reason to use Nim, so no one but language enthusiasts will.

Reason for using Nim is its simplicity, anyone writing Python can switch to Nim, fast compile times and it's speed which is on par with C/C++

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#103
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heck, it sounds like bash/ask might even fit this use case if the code is so small as to not need functions. Assuming that "ask" was a typo and you meant "awk", awk does support user-defined functions, as does bash. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/User_002d... https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/functions.html The support for that in both is somewhat limited as compared to "full" programming languages,…

Yep, autocorrect I guess. My point being if someone is just doing a little string work than she'll scripting can be very performant and also dead simple. I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.

>I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.

It typically is. If you have the right libraries, it's only a few lines of code to do a lot of math. C = A + B could be matrix math, not just single variables being added.

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#104
post #8

You know why I like Rust as a programmer? It's community feels a lot like how the Perl community did at the height of Perl's popularity. This is in contrast to Python's (has a friendly community, but tends to have bikeshedding), Node's (outright toxic npm-based warfare), or Java's (corporations shit out awful code when they're done with it, ie, everything donated to Eclipse or Apache, or all the dumpster fire code Go…

Maybe Rust is the true Perl 6 :O

Well, Rust does share its first letter with the Raku Programming Language, the new name of Perl 6 (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media).

Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, autocorrect I guess. My point being if someone is just doing a little string work than she'll scripting can be very performant and also dead simple. I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything.

>I normally think of scientific programming as something involving lots of large matrices, but that isn't the case for everything. It typically is. If you have the right libraries, it's only a few lines of code to do a lot of math. C = A + B could be matrix math, not just single variables being added.

In my experience yes, but I started thinking about stuff like the human genome project which was mostly done with Perl scripts and BioPerl in the year 2000 iirc. I assume that is mostly just regex work dealing with very large strings. Is it scientific computing? Yes, just not as how I typically view scientific computing.
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