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Rust Survey 2021 Results

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Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#11

Post by anyfoo »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #6

I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…

The problem with that is in large parts that Haskell 98 is very outdated, and so relatively basic and absolutely useful extensions are in the same pot as all the experimental stuff.

Haskell Prime, essentially the Haskell 98 successor, is supposed to fix that. The first thing I do in almost any Haskell project is enable a bunch of extensions that I consider absolutely essential[1]. Most or all of those should likely be incorporated into the new standard, and then the truly experimental stuff stands out as experimental again.

Unfortunately it seems that Haskell Prime efforts have slowed down, despite a very active Haskell community in total. I have not looked into details there, though.

[1] For example ScopedTypeVariables, where it's hard to imagine for me at least why this would not be the default.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#12

Post by chrismorgan »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #6

I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…

Rust is necessarily a comparatively large language, but I’m content that at present it’s not getting noticeably worse: additions are mostly filling things that could be expected but are missing, plus some focusing on improving ergonomics.

Take generic associated types, for example: they’re a major new feature… but are conceptually just removing a potentially surprising limitation.

Or const generics: they really are a major new feature, but in general the code that can use them was a good deal more complex and inconsistent before.

You’d have a stronger argument about complexity creep on async—there was lots of demand for it, but it’s not clear that the design that is now frozen was in fact ideal.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#13

Post by spenczar5 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #2

I found this surprising... 59% of respondents sounds huge! "Rust can now safely be classified as a language used by people in professional settings. Of those respondents using Rust, 59% use it at least occasionally at work with 23% using Rust for the majority of their coding. This is a large increase over last year where only 42% of respondents used Rust at work."

I write a bit of Rust, but not for work, and I never heard about this survey. I think that's probably common - the more Rust you write, the more likely it is that you fill out the survey, so the sample is probably very biased towards people who work with it a lot (ie, professionally).

Or - you could describe that as biased, at least. Alternatively, maybe the intent of these language surveys is exactly to find out what committed power-users think. Either way, interpreting results from language surveys is tricky business.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#14

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #9
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is entirely surprising. Rust isn't many people's first language. People who learn it, mostly do because they have become fed up with the unreliability (typically of C). This creates a bias towards people who are more experienced and have more organizational power. Also, language surveys tend to be biased towards power users which can shift the sample significantly. For example, the Julia survey fro…

> Rust isn't many people's first language. Has anyone actually tried to teach/learn Rust as a first programming language? People did it with C++ (and even C) at some point, is Rust that much more problematic? (And the attempt might even inform new convenience features: the proc macro system gives Rust a lot of inherent flexibility there.)

People have. In my opinion, it's a bad idea. I think that to appreciate Rust's design, you pretty much have to be familiar with the awfulness of memory leaks in C/C++ (and it helps if you have experience trying to make a program in a GCed language hit strict latency requirements). I think Rust's design is genius, but I think the first language you learn should be an easy language with a GC (there's enough hard parts of learning your first PL). The next step is to learn C (because it's beautiful but fatally flawed), and only after you have learned why manual allocs and frees suck, should you learn Rust.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#15

Post by zozbot234 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #14
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust isn't many people's first language. Has anyone actually tried to teach/learn Rust as a first programming language? People did it with C++ (and even C) at some point, is Rust that much more problematic? (And the attempt might even inform new convenience features: the proc macro system gives Rust a lot of inherent flexibility there.)

People have. In my opinion, it's a bad idea. I think that to appreciate Rust's design, you pretty much have to be familiar with the awfulness of memory leaks in C/C++ (and it helps if you have experience trying to make a program in a GCed language hit strict latency requirements). I think Rust's design is genius, but I think the first language you learn should be an easy language with a GC (there's enough hard parts…

The easiest way to conceptualize Rust's design at a basic level (suitable for first-time learners) is probably as a glorified functional language, where you initially pass everything by value (courtesy of .clone()) aside from shared immutable data (passed via shared references). Mutable borrowing can then be introduced next, followed by the "cell" patterns/constructs for shared mutable state. Not altogether trivial, but it seems like it could work. And the compiler would protect against many errors along the way, that bite C/C++ coders.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#17

Post by dnsco »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #6

I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…

GHC seems to be more of a platform for crafting your own language than rust. Yes, rust nightly has experimental features that can enabled, but they seem to have gone through more vetting and design, whereas in GHC the features seem to be much more exploratory, or more explicitly, research oriented. It seems as though every contemporary haskell program is written in a different language, though rust at least, always has stable, which seems a much more sensible default than GHC's.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#18

Post by LAC-Tech »

I have some time between contracts and I've found myself learning rust.

Pros:

- Sum types. I am an OO apologist, but trying to use classes in C++ is an exercise in frustration. Sum types map very well to union types and are a better fit for systems programming.

- Unit tests built right into the language - it seems like a small thing but it's a hassle in most languages to choose a library, set it up etc.

- The above, combined with cargo-watch [0]. With the right flags, you hit save, and your tests all run. It's a god-send.

- Ecosystem is pretty big. I can find most things I need.

- Discord channel is nice. I was put off a bit by the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce back in the day, but so far everyone is pretty chill.

- Options & Results in the standard library. All languages should have this

Cons:

- I find it hard to transfer knowledge of C to rust, because they use different terminology.

- Docs can be confusing to read because every method on collections like `map` or `filter` returns its own Trait. People have explained why this is to me a couple of times but I still haven't gotten it through my head.

- You still have to think about memory and pointers. Not always a bad thing, but it is an extra dimension when solving a problem.

Overall I'm powering through. I'm hoping to get to a point where Rust is an obvious choice for anything that involves finer control of memory.

[0] https://github.com/watchexec/cargo-watch

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#19

Post by CornCobs »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #14
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust isn't many people's first language. Has anyone actually tried to teach/learn Rust as a first programming language? People did it with C++ (and even C) at some point, is Rust that much more problematic? (And the attempt might even inform new convenience features: the proc macro system gives Rust a lot of inherent flexibility there.)

People have. In my opinion, it's a bad idea. I think that to appreciate Rust's design, you pretty much have to be familiar with the awfulness of memory leaks in C/C++ (and it helps if you have experience trying to make a program in a GCed language hit strict latency requirements). I think Rust's design is genius, but I think the first language you learn should be an easy language with a GC (there's enough hard parts…

I agree. I think Rust (or at least many tutorials of Rust) paper over ownership as something the compiler deals with for you but I think that's false. You have to think about memory and ownership. Only when I started using C++ where you have to think about the same things but without the static checking do I appreciate the ability to statically check and enforce things like moving and borrowing

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#20

Post by pie_flavor »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #10
FullyFunctional wrote: post #6

I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…

Alas I had fun with rust and made some small apps but as I got deeper I just got scared off by the learning curve. I'm kind of over the hump with c++, javascript and python and I just couldn't do it again. Maybe I will revisit in a few years if it actually slows down.

The language evolution speed has nothing whatsoever to do with the learning curve - there's like two major features a year, one of which is only for advanced users. The rolling release cycle just means the tiny incremental improvements arrive sooner. The learning curve has been in place since 1.0 and it only gets harder the more times you give up.
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