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Why Rust is a great choice for startups

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Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#281

Post by akhmatova »

tartoran wrote: post #280
akhmatova wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to know what you're doing The problem is that there just aren't that many people who choose to invest in learning Haskell -- or for that matter, the essential-to-master nooks and crannies of Rust. And the learning curve to get there is intrinsically steeper that for, well, all those "dum-dum" ducktyped and/or mostly procedural languages one imagines you don't particular care much for, now do you. Of cou…

How do you know it didn’t work out very well for them and they keep it quiet just so the competion doesn’t gain the same advantage? There is that possibility or it could be that the same team would be capable enough to change the stack and paradigm and get more or less the same results, with some twist and a different flavor. It’s hard to know for sure I think.

We don't know of course; nor do we have any reason to believe it does work.

But as for "keeping quiet" -- that they aren't doing at all. They are (or at least were, when I last paid attention to this stuff) extremely forward about their belief in FP as part of their secret sauce for staying ahead of the competition.

Which, ironically, makes one further question whether it has all that much benefit. Because if it really did ... yeah, they'd probably want to keep quiet about it. Like any other truly winning strategy in their arsenal.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#282

Post by pjmlp »

valbaca wrote: post #247
taylodl wrote: post #204

Rust is not a great choice for startups! In fact, NO LANGUAGE is a great choice for startups! You don't choose languages depending on whether you're a startup! You choose languages based of the problem you're trying to solve, how fit the language is for solving that particular problem, the ecosystem supporting that language, and the availability of developers who are experienced with that language. Rust just may be t…

> Rust just may be the best choice for your startup, but it's not necessarily the best choice for all startups - in fact it's probably not the best choice for most startups! Maybe it's just an assumption on your end. Neither title nor author imply that it's THE choice. The title literally says "a great choice" > In the next post we’ll go into some of the downsides of using Rust.

Looking forward to see how Rust is a great choice for startups doing mobile apps, native GUIs for desktop or embedded devices, or game development for consoles.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#284

Post by nerdponx »

pjmlp wrote: post #208
steeleduncan wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. Rust undoubtedly started on *nix, but all Tier 1 platforms are supported equally[1]. To quote from OCaml's main site[2] A gentle reminder that if you do not need Windows binaries, then a more stable option is to use WSL2 , ie when on Windows it is better to use OCaml from within a Linux VM. Ocaml is great, but its Windows support sucks, and that makes adoption hard in a lot of contexts. [1] https://do…

Any language that calls themselves systems programming language, on Windows, must have first class support for COM and WinRT, in their various workloads. Rust support for them is pretty much WIP. And then there is the whole matter that Windows shops love to ship binary libraries.

What languages/platforms do meet this criterion? .NET, C, C++, Python? I know pretty much nothing about Windows system programming, but I wouldn't be surprised if most programming languages really are "Unix first".

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#285

Post by JoelMcCracken »

incrudible wrote: post #262
JoelMcCracken wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell is fine for production code. You just need to know what you're doing, and not go crazy with abstraction.

Haskell culture is all about exploration, which means you do not know what you are doing, by definition. A large part of that exploration revolves around abstraction.

You shouldn't make the job harder than it needs to be. The main danger is using tools/techniques you don't know well. Learn radical new approaches on your own time. Don't bet the farm on the latest free monad framework which has 10 downloads on hackage.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#286

Post by JoelMcCracken »

akhmatova wrote: post #273
JoelMcCracken wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell is fine for production code. You just need to know what you're doing, and not go crazy with abstraction.

You just need to know what you're doing The problem is that there just aren't that many people who choose to invest in learning Haskell -- or for that matter, the essential-to-master nooks and crannies of Rust. And the learning curve to get there is intrinsically steeper that for, well, all those "dum-dum" ducktyped and/or mostly procedural languages one imagines you don't particular care much for, now do you. Of cou…

> now do you Depends. I like JS ok. I really like Lisps. I miss doing Ruby sometimes. I've been doing more Python lately and find it rather distasteful, all this tooling is just so so complicated for very dubious guarantees/benefit. Not all of us are a sum of tropes.

The main thing that I find frustrating is that the actual act of programming in an impure language is so much harder. Haskell is def harder to learn, like 10x at least imo. Especially for a mainstream dev. But, once you know it, there is a simplicity to what you're doing which is very easy to do. I find myself having to just think so hard when writing python. "what exacty does this function do? Oh it calls this other function, I have to go check that one." etc. And then with a myriad of control flow issues, and random syntactic "sugar" to contend with...

There are a number of haskell companies, not just Jane street, and they do pretty well. If you don't follow the space closely, it is not surprising that you don't know about it. But there are. Not nearly as many as Python or whatever, but the appeal to the popular is def problematic: mostly because, at one point python itself was a radical new thing, full of skeptics like "if its so great, why don't more people use it".

Many ideas from haskell/typed fp are slowly making their way out into the larger community. Witness Swift, Kotlin, Java, numerous features in C#, etc. People like them.

Its fine if you don't like Haskell and don't want to use it. But its not an insane choice.

Haskell community really needs to do better at making it easier to get started though. Eventually I hope to contribute to that.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#287

Post by pjmlp »

nerdponx wrote: post #284
pjmlp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any language that calls themselves systems programming language, on Windows, must have first class support for COM and WinRT, in their various workloads. Rust support for them is pretty much WIP. And then there is the whole matter that Windows shops love to ship binary libraries.

What languages/platforms do meet this criterion? .NET, C, C++, Python? I know pretty much nothing about Windows system programming, but I wouldn't be surprised if most programming languages really are "Unix first".

.NET languages, C++ and Delphi are the elephant in the room regarding Windows.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#288

Post by stouset »

amelius wrote: post #201
throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, everyone wants to be a Rust programmer I understand why you might have got that impression, but that's a far cry from the reality

It really puzzles me why smart people want to spend their time satisfying the borrow checker rather than inventing new and useful things.

"It really puzzles me why smart people want to spend their time satisfying the (compiler errors | warnings | linter) rather than inventing new and useful things."

Over the past fifty years we've realized that even incredibly smart people suck at avoiding the gazillion pitfalls involved in programming. Virtually every professional programming environment these days employs a suite of tools that help ensure we don't make certain classes of avoidable mistakes, and the borrow checker is simply another one of these tools to protect us from ourselves.

Am I to assume you don't turn on any warnings or linters in any of your projects?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#289

Post by stouset »

amelius wrote: post #265
unrealhoang wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does the entire way of coding in any static-typed language, your code is full of compromises that would otherwise not exist in a dynamic-type language. Rust is just another layer of static typing.

Yes. It's another level of the same problem. Rust is like a piano where certain keys have been removed so you never play out of key.

You can pretty much make this same argument about any language higher-level than C.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#290

Post by unrealhoang »

stouset wrote: post #289
amelius wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's another level of the same problem. Rust is like a piano where certain keys have been removed so you never play out of key.

You can pretty much make this same argument about any language higher-level than C.

maybe assembly. Even C can be applied to their argument just fine.
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