Pity that it is hard to find Rust jobs outside blockchain.
Rust Survey 2021 Results
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
Rust keeps making small usability improvements all the time, but the major improvements have already landed in the 2018 edition (smarter borrow checker, modules syntax, forgiving match patterns).
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#43I'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…
Some people (including me) felt how async was added was worrying.
Adding ".await" means when I teach Rust we now need to say "x.y is member access. Unless y is 'await'. Then it's something totally different". That's the type of strange rule that C++ has, and if you gather enough of them, languages become very hard to teach.
However, async seems to be the only big language feature which effected many things which has been added.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#44I 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,…
> every method on collections like `map` or `filter` I think you're remembering the various iterator adaptors, but they aren't methods on collections, they work on Iterators as their name implies. Somebody else explained why these methods can't all just return "Iterator" (that isn't a type) but just thought I'd mention you won't find map and filter in Rust's Vec or HashMap types, those methods live in the Iterator tr…
`iterator.map(…)` must return a new wrapper type, because it needs to store the closure somewhere, so it returns
struct Map { closure, original_iterator }
But I do agree that the way documentation presents traits and their implementations can be overwhelming, especially the Iterator which is a pretty large trait.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#45I'm curious about the methodology of this survey. The first thing I think about when reading survey results is the possibility of selection bias.
Ah yes these things are not scientific studies. Just read them as tech culture with diagrams and numbers.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the same feeling, Rust seems to be going down the path of "#[feature]" collection.
It shares that as well as horrendous compile times with Swift.
The irony being that while C++ is known for its compile times, the ecosystem relience on binary libraries makes it much more tolerable.
Microsoft is also shipping pre-compiled projections for Rust/WinRT.
Then we have examples like image, that compile rayon twice, with different versions, because we just love to watch third party crates being compiled.
However I should also add that compile times have improved greatly, my travel netbook can finally handle small Rust projects without killing the battery.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Some people (including me) felt how async was added was worrying. Adding ".await" means when I teach Rust we now need to say "x.y is member access. Unless y is 'await'. Then it's something totally different". That's the type of strange rule that C++ has, and if you gather enough of them, languages become very hard to teach. However, async seems to be the only big language feature which effected many things which has…
Yeah, the await syntax is just bizarre. One of the worst eyesores of any languages I've personally encountered.
An await macro or function would have sufficed but because Rust is still mainly a hipster language with a hipster community, they had to choose a hipster syntax after years of bikeshedding about how to make it absolutely perfect.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#48I'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 h…
> GHC seems to be more of a platform for crafting your own language than rust.
It’s always been that tho, one of the motivations behind Haskell was to have a unified basis for FP language research: at the time (late 80s) there were a dozen half-assed half-implemented languages in the space, and the main and most stable platform (Miranda) was proprietary software.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#49Earlier 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…
Rust is strict about ownership, which doesn't have equivalent in other popular languages. Users coming from GC languages are surprised Rust can't make things "live long enough". Users coming from OOP languages are surprised that Rust has on-stack objects without a layer of indirection. Users coming from C are surprised that references aren't like pointers.
So I think it would be interesting to teach users Rust's point of view first, before they learn the "misconceptions" from other languages.
But in practice something like JS is better, because students can make something engaging appear on screen before they lose patience.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#50I'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…
Rust doesn't reuse concepts well. The different capabilities and subsystems are all build from disjoint building blocks, which you could call modular in a sense, but it doesn't make them easy to use, learn, or joyful.
The module system, the macro system(s), the core language, the borrow checker. It's all different micro-languages without a shared foundation.
I think it's easier to when you compare Rust to simpler languages like Carp or Zig.
Carp due to its homoiconicity and lisp heritage allows you to write macros in regular old Carp. Zig doesn't really have Macros, but comptime (compile time) code evaluation, which results in something with a lot of the benefits of a macro system without the drawback of unreadable DSLs, because it too is plain old Zig annotated with `comptime`. Zigs module system is build on Struct name-spacing, so if you know Structs, you know the module system. Its build system is also build on Zig code.
My guess is that Rusts origins are partially to be blamed for this, the web is build the same way, disjoint standards that are developed by different groups of people. It's just that just like the web, the sum of the parts is less elegant and usable than each constituent.