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Rust Survey 2021 Results

blog.rust-lang.org

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Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#21

Post by berkut »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #18

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,…

As someone with 20 years of C++ experience, in industries from everything from real-time systems through to low-level HPC graphics on CPU/GPU (currently in VFX), I really don't understand the hatred for OO programming, and I must be either missing something, or being lucky with the codebases I'm working on...

It's a tool for encapsulation: you can get into trouble with it, but I'd argue the same is possible with many things - it's how well you use it. You can easily use state composition in C++ if you want, and generally (multiple inheritance can cause issues in some cases) you can use interface classes as well.

And as someone who's been learning Rust for the past 6+ months, I've found that of the three new projects I started which I started in Rust instead of C++/Python over the past 4 months, Composition actually worked quite less well (it's quite verbose due to all the plumbing needed to connect things up) than if I could have used OO interitance in many situations where I wanted specialisation - i.e. hierarchy behaviour traits that had both common shared state and functionality AND specialised state and functionality. Thankfully Traits can at least have default implementations - if not, things would have been a bit worse.

To be clear: there's a lot to like in Rust though.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#22

Post by pie_flavor »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #18

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,…

They return their own type, all of which implement a common trait, because traits are not types, and there's two options for representing 'any type that implements this trait', one of which can't be returned without allocating it (dyn), and the other of which can't be used in trait methods (impl). As a (frankly minimal in my opinion) effort to make this less weird to look at, the docs now have a (nearly invisible) 'notable traits' hoverable, which tells you what types implement Iterator and that anything other than them implementing Iterator is not very important.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#23

Post by pie_flavor »

berkut wrote: post #21
LAC-Tech wrote: post #18

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,…

As someone with 20 years of C++ experience, in industries from everything from real-time systems through to low-level HPC graphics on CPU/GPU (currently in VFX), I really don't understand the hatred for OO programming, and I must be either missing something, or being lucky with the codebases I'm working on... It's a tool for encapsulation: you can get into trouble with it, but I'd argue the same is possible with many…

Encapsulation is just another way of saying correctly used visibility modifiers. It doesn't mean the state has to be inseparable from the behavior, and its role is semantically fulfilled in Rust by modules. And IME issues with OO feeling like the better role tend to be people attempting to solve all the problems with one feature like OO lets you do, shying away from doing it with multiple features even though they're really multiple concerns. E.g. for common behavior manipulating common state among several local structs, a macro is what you'd use.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#24

Post by svnpenn »

pie_flavor wrote: post #20
stjohnswarts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> language evolution speed has nothing whatsoever to do with the learning curve

I don't think that's true at all. Little by little, ergonomic changes make it in, that are actually quality of life improvements for the end user. Better error messages, smarter faster compiler, better idioms etc. These are all small, but they add up. For someone coming into the language cold, it can be the difference between a terrible experience and a decent one. No language was born perfect, so let's not pretend Rust is there, or even close.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#25

Post by Epskampie »

Animats wrote: post #16

The percentage of people using Rust continues to rise. How was the sample selected?

Why, selfselected of course! How surprising that people who still chose to fill out a rust survey in 2021 increasingly use rust! ;-)

On topic, i’d like to try out rust, but can’t find good cause in my daily webdev needs.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#26

Post by dgellow »

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…

I often see people complaining how bloated or large the language is, but I never see specifics. As someone who started learning and using Rust at the beginning of this year I was surprised to find out how simple the language is given its reputation on forums. What makes you feel the language is becoming too large, where is the feature creep, and where is the complexity you're talking about? Are you talking about the stdlib or language features?

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#27

Post by urthor »

berkut wrote: post #21
LAC-Tech wrote: post #18

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,…

As someone with 20 years of C++ experience, in industries from everything from real-time systems through to low-level HPC graphics on CPU/GPU (currently in VFX), I really don't understand the hatred for OO programming, and I must be either missing something, or being lucky with the codebases I'm working on... It's a tool for encapsulation: you can get into trouble with it, but I'd argue the same is possible with many…

The criticism of OO is more Java and Gang of 4 related than anything.

Two things get the enterprise devs of the mid 2000s going:

Badmouthing Oracle. And complaining about refactoring someone's mess of an abstract factory.

Especially I would say since microkernels just became incredibly widespread After Docker. Encapsulation is just not as necessary as it used to be.

In C++ the whole encapsulated structs thingo works fine.

It's there for when you need it, and you don't need it when you don't.

Gang of 4-esque programming is okay when it's necessary. Sometimes you are making something with a 100 different buttons and you just gotta do it that way.

However, for every project that needs all those factories and such, there's probably 5-10 where straight procedural/functional programming is perfectly fine.

Or in the case of many data oriented applications, or when formal verification is needed, probably just straight better.

Just do your abstraction with subroutine signatures and scope.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#28

Post by philosopher1234 »

dgellow wrote: post #26
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…

I often see people complaining how bloated or large the language is, but I never see specifics. As someone who started learning and using Rust at the beginning of this year I was surprised to find out how simple the language is given its reputation on forums. What makes you feel the language is becoming too large, where is the feature creep, and where is the complexity you're talking about? Are you talking about the…

Complexity is a death by a thousand cuts issue. I suspect most people complaining are going to have a hard time enumerating the many small sources of complexity they encountered.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#29

Post by pjmlp »

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…

I get the same feeling, Rust seems to be going down the path of "#[feature]" collection.
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