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Rust Survey 2021 Results

blog.rust-lang.org

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Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#51

Post by zozbot234 »

CJefferson wrote: post #43
dgellow wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

.await is a postfix keyword - it effectively means "crazy control-flow (monadic) magic is happening here". "?" for failure handling is another bit of postfix syntax, that means something very similar. A good IDE will show it with a different highlight, so that it will never be confused for a struct member or method call.

This stuff was discussed by the community for a long time - bikeshedding about syntax is a well-known "trap" in programming language design. It has turned out to be (IMHO) reasonably intuitive, and preferable to the alternatives.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#52

Post by dgellow »

CJefferson wrote: post #43
dgellow wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

That's a fair point. I haven't touched async yet but I've seen lot of discussions regarding "await" and that seems to create a good amount of confusion. Still we are multiple magnitude away from the level of complexity C++ has.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#53

Post by pornel »

eminence32 wrote: post #5
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…

Your comment about people with "more organizational power" may be an accurate reflection of things, but I don't think it's necessary to explain this increase in people using rust at work. It could be that more and more people are using rust for small ad-hoc scripts, which might have been written in python or java before. These small things might not require any organizational approval, but people might be more comfor…

I think that's a genuine use of Rust for Real Work™. For example, Cloudflare went from using Rust for one project 3 years ago, to depending on Rust in core components and using it by default for almost all new development.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#54

Post by zozbot234 »

cedws wrote: post #47
CJefferson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Prefix syntax has drawbacks that were constantly pointed out in that long discussion. In particular, it doesn't compose well in practical scenarios. .await just 'flows' better and in a more intuituve way.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#56

Post by masklinn »

chrismorgan wrote: post #12
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…

One of the annoying things though is lots of the fills are rather inelegant extensions of APIs. They’re not nonsensical, and TBH I don’t really have a solution, but e.g. allocators support (between custom allocators and faillible allocations) ultimately doubles the size of Vec, or near enough. This makes going through the API a major chore.

But maybe this would be better fixed through Rustdoc, by supporting topics / sections, and being able to “globally” set which standard topics you’re interested in e.g. I don’t do embedded so generally unsafe and explicit allocations I’m uninterested in, that stuff could be folded away / hidden in both the sidebar & main text.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#57

Post by zozbot234 »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
jamil7 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

C++ binary libraries are a disaster. At least Rust is honest and tells you to just fall back to the C ABI for interop, and rebuild high-level abstractions around it in code that's built with the project - much like a 'header-only library' in C++.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#58

Post by dgellow »

zozbot234 wrote: post #51
CJefferson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

.await is a postfix keyword - it effectively means "crazy control-flow (monadic) magic is happening here". "?" for failure handling is another bit of postfix syntax, that means something very similar. A good IDE will show it with a different highlight, so that it will never be confused for a struct member or method call. This stuff was discussed by the community for a long time - bikeshedding about syntax is a well-k…

Isn't "?" just a sugar for something like the following? That's how I think about it in my mind at least.

  // with "?"
  let v = x?;

  // without "?"
  let v = match x {
    Ok(o) => Ok(o),
    Err(e) => return Err(e), // exit current scope due to the return
  }.unwrap();
That feels like something that could be done with a macro.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#59

Post by dgb23 »

Rust is a terribly slow language to write in, especially if you’re trying to fight it in any way - because you‘ll lose.

It’s verbose and quite ugly as it tries to appeal to C family programmers while being expression and pattern based.

When trying to resolve ownership issues with closures the first time, you‘ll be doubting whether Rust is in fact a language or just a sick elaborate joke that tries to mock you for even considering to use it.

But with every concept learned you feel accomplished and start to develop Stockholm syndrome. The Rust compiler beats you to pieces and puts you together again.

As a new programmer, you rise from the ashes of your past inadequacies and delusions:

„Rust is actually a pretty productive language.“

On a more serious note: there is a book „Programming Rust“ and likely others that help with a structured introduction to the language, which I feel is a warranted approach, especially if the memory management concepts seem alien to you.

Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results

#60

Post by zozbot234 »

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 'hate' is reserved for implementation inheritance, which has its well-known drawbacks (research the "fragile base class problem") - basically, it introduces complex long-range coupling throughout inheritance hierarchies that makes it way too hard, or even impossible, to evolve code over time. Everything else is very much doable in Rust.
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