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Rust Foundation: Hello, World

foundation.rust-lang.org

81–90 of 284 posts

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#81
post #11

Awesome news! Rust is easily the best programming experience I've had--the language feels incredibly well thought out, common tooling like doc generation and dependency management are included with the language, and the compiler takes full advantage of language features such that my editor's linter is able to detect most mistakes I make and the language itself guards me from doing anything obviously unsafe. I thought…

serious question : would you recommend Rust for CRUDdy type of web applications -- stuff where mostly you are firing off prepared statememts at a SQL db and then applying business logic to result set. This is what most J2EE apps do currently.

Reddit thread about this question from yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/leki5o/advantages_of_...

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#82
post #66
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to raise awareness to a tiny detail: > February 9th, at 4pm CT. When using local time zones we should strive to always also add the equivalent GMT time to a global audience - even if this audience will not participate in the meeting, it is good to have an idea of when that is actually happening without needing to go through a timezone converter.

I don't think I understand. Those are both just time zones, right? So knowing what time it happens elsewhere requires a conversion no matter what time zone you gave originally, doesn't it?

I find it very funny that four people independently wrote almost the exact same response to your question.

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#83

A win for Rust for sure, but it also seems like a loss for Mozilla.

This is a very good "partial exit" for Mozilla, actually. The original plan might be to do something like this to split the cost, while oxidized Firefox still reaps more benefits than the competition playing catch-up.

Rust can't/shouldn't be directly monitized, so it makes sense to have something like this. Mozilla can still hire as many people as they want, but they never attempted to make it a company-managed project.

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#84
post #80

A win for Rust for sure, but it also seems like a loss for Mozilla.

Honestly steering a programming language is basically just work and writing rather than anything particularly strategic.

Depends. Do you want the language to go somewhere in particular, or just wander around accumulating features? If you want it to go somewhere, steering it there becomes strategic. In particular, it's strategic for the survival and ongoing health of the language.

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#85
post #11

Awesome news! Rust is easily the best programming experience I've had--the language feels incredibly well thought out, common tooling like doc generation and dependency management are included with the language, and the compiler takes full advantage of language features such that my editor's linter is able to detect most mistakes I make and the language itself guards me from doing anything obviously unsafe. I thought…

> Rust is easily the best programming experience I've had

When you make this statement, what languages are you comparing it against?

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#86
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is already in Debian's repository. The trademarks haven't been an issue at all.

It seems no one had to rebrand Rust yet, but can you guarantee this will always be the case? Firefox was fine in debian until 2006.

Well it'll be amusing to see the playful knockoff names that Debian will come up with when rebranding Rust.

Will they go with the metal chemistry theme, go back to the original plant pathology one?

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archa...

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#87
As someone who wants to use Rust for real world applications, what are some good use cases for Rust? Web development is not its strong suite, apparently.

Or, better still, what have you personally built using Rust?

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#88
post #11

Awesome news! Rust is easily the best programming experience I've had--the language feels incredibly well thought out, common tooling like doc generation and dependency management are included with the language, and the compiler takes full advantage of language features such that my editor's linter is able to detect most mistakes I make and the language itself guards me from doing anything obviously unsafe. I thought…

serious question : would you recommend Rust for CRUDdy type of web applications -- stuff where mostly you are firing off prepared statememts at a SQL db and then applying business logic to result set. This is what most J2EE apps do currently.

I have some extensive (self-assesment :) ) experience building this kind of application, and my answer would be "no, but maybe" (I was one of the first engineers & architect on our zero to ~500k codebase).

Some of the arbitrary, random things I've learned:

1. Given how nice and powerful language is, Rust works relatively well with less experienced engineers. Potentially. You can build very nice APIs which are straightforward to use.

If you can stay in this territory, everything is great.

However, there are some hard walls in Rust which are really difficult to jump over. And once you hit them, you really need somebody who understands Rust really really well and is capable of working around those issues.

2. It was quite hard to find the right balance between engineering time, compilation/linking time, safety, ease of use, performance, etc. Might be my personal biases, but I had to make some questionable decisions to keep compilation times / turnaround times at bay (like, unsound plugin system, custom serialization framework or test framework using nightly Rust features).

3. The type system is really, really nice. This alone compensates for a lot of things.

4. Ecosystem? Simply amazing. High quality libraries, documentation and everything.

5. Ecosystem again? Lots of things are still missing.

6. Performance? I'm 90% trolling here, but my experience was that Rust is not "blazing fast" by default. Not for "enterprise" software. You have to do some legwork sometimes. I've built some simple tool to do certain transformation between JSON and XML, and out of gate it was ~2x slower than Java equivalent (yes, with release build). Turned out, strings are not that cheap to clone if all you have is a bunch of strings. I did make it like 5x times faster than Java in the end, but it did require some weird tricks (like forcing hash map to look for a "derived" key than I give it).

There were some other cases where performance was reduced by simple things (like, having "heavy" Result vs having error variant boxed).

I think, this is "easily" counteracted by adopted practices and libraries (optimized error types, for instance), some standard patterns (like don't be afraid of Arc, they are better than to move huge data chunks around), maybe, good profilers as well.

This is probably also my biases talking here, frankly, I don't think it mattered at all (performance was killed by database, as is very common with enterprise systems). Also, in the end, it was fast (outside of database woes).

7. Overall, I find Rust very exciting language to work with, which was a big driver (but that doesn't necessarily scale -- you'll have to have some answer prepared when less experienced engineers will ask you "but why can't I do like I did in Typescript in those trivial 500 lines of code").

Would I do it again? Probably, but with understanding that whoever pays for it, might be paying for my "fun" on top of the product they are getting. Which is not necessarily a bad thing -- "fun" is also a factor in attraction and retention of engineers.

I'm also not going to lean into the "dark side". Like, if all you care is to get some half-broken whatever out as quick as possible, Rust might not be the right choice. It makes you think about "right or wrong" a lot, imo.

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serious question : would you recommend Rust for CRUDdy type of web applications -- stuff where mostly you are firing off prepared statememts at a SQL db and then applying business logic to result set. This is what most J2EE apps do currently.

I'm mostly a rails developer and really want to get into Rust. I went through the tutorial and did some practice on Excersism. I'm not a rust expert but I enjoyed working with it and learning about it. With that disclaimer: as of now, what rust lacks is a comprehensive framework for web development. I'm sure your story in the J2EE world is similar to rails: you have libraries that you can use to abstract away a lot o…

actix-web seems really interesting, just from some cursory reading.

Also, from a performance standpoint, it seems to be _really_ good: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

This example in particular piqued my interest: https://github.com/actix/examples/blob/master/async_pg/src/m...

I have no experience in Rust whatsoever, but I feel inspired to try it out.

Re: Rust Foundation: Hello, World

#90

As a C developer, after getting sick and tired of hearing about Rust everywhere, I decided to do a bit of assessment in terms of code-size complexity. I heard of ripgrep, an amazing twenty-first century revolution that beats grep in the dust. I have never seen grep source code. I told myself, if I download ripgrep-on-Rust and grep-on-C and find out that ripgrep is doing all it's doing in one-tenth the size of grep so…

The amount of damage stupid and overconfident people can cause with sharp tools like C is a too high to bear risk. That’s why we instead use Java or (God forbid) JavaScript, but at the expense of speed. Rust tries to gain back this lost speed without making it too easy for idiots to destroy everything. Such code can of course look larger and more convoluted than over decades on every corner optimized C code, but at l…

Making tools for "idiots" didn't really work out so far, that's how we got Cobol and Java.

From my experience, empathy works better as a design strategy.

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