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Rust – A hard decision pays off

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Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#51

Post by throwaway894345 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #45
throwaway894345 wrote: post #41

> Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. I don't doubt this in the least. I've been a professional Python developer for 15 years, and I can't believe Python ever had the reputation for "high dev velocity" beyond toy examples. In every real world code base I've worked in, Python has been a strict liability and the promise that you can "just rewrite the slow…

If people only used Python as originally intended (as a language to write small scripts in), this kind of problem never would have happened.

Sure, but the Python community itself promoted the idea that Python was suitable for general application development and so on. And it probably was a really good option back in the day when people were using C, C++, Perl, and PHPv4. And I'm sure there are still some areas where it's a fine option (maybe heavy data science stuff?). But I would only use it as an absolutely final resort.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#52

Post by ncmncm »

tialaramex wrote: post #31
endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

Search your heart, do you think this story ends similarly if they decide to all do "modern C++" instead? My guess is that even with initial discipline in the form of code review and style enforcement by one or two people, the C++ descends into a riot of different opinions about, as usual, which are the good bits. A similar piece of software could be written in C++ but I doubt it gets written successfully, in similar…

This is an exceedingly silly conclusion. "Similar pieces of software" are coded in C++ and shipped every single day, without anyone saying "and we managed to do it in C++, too!" The emphasis should be on what the software does well, and how, not on what hoops the developers were jumped through on the way.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#53

Post by Kinrany »

benreesman wrote: post #44
throwaway894345 wrote: post #41

> Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. I don't doubt this in the least. I've been a professional Python developer for 15 years, and I can't believe Python ever had the reputation for "high dev velocity" beyond toy examples. In every real world code base I've worked in, Python has been a strict liability and the promise that you can "just rewrite the slow…

I think Rust deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the notion of “constraints as power”, but excessive enthusiasm around it does seem to obscure the rich traditions of PLT that it has more than liberally borrowed from. There are more rungs on the ladder.

"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many common scenarios, forcing language designers to offer many unsafe escape hatches.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#54

Post by mynameisash »

ncmncm wrote: post #46
diarrhea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The language is still more likely than not to fizzle. What makes you think that?

Fizzling is the normal fate of any new language, absent a miracle. Only a tiny handful of languages get a miracle. In any given week, more people pick up C++ or Javascript to use professionally than the total number now employed to code Rust. Not to fizzle, it has to increase its adoption rate by orders of magnitude, but its fans are almost uniformly hostile toward any measure that could make it easier to adopt.

> its fans are almost uniformly hostile toward any measure that could make it easier to adopt.

Do you have an example exhibiting what you mean here?

I would self-describe as a fan of Rust, but I also think I'm pretty realistic about its limitations and that every language has its niche. I will say that as far as miracles go, being the most-loved language on SO for seven years seems like a bit of a (minor) miracle here, and at about 87% loved vs Python's 67%, it's not exactly eking out a win. It'll take time for it to grow in market share, but it seems likely it's on its way, given that it is, for example, breaking into the Linux codebase - something C++ wasn't able to do.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#55

Post by nu11ptr »

This doesn't surprise me and matches my own experience. Rust literally makes a codebase nearly void of most bug classes with the exception of logic bugs (Unfortunately, in a huge codebase, there can still be tons and tons of logic bugs).

Still, when I migrated my Python codebase to Rust I got rid of whole classes of bugs and honestly code faster in Rust on a "per debugged line of code" basis. In Python, every line MUST be run or could trigger an exception (and so many do and it is hard to see). This now requires a test harness that tests every single line which is a huge pain. In Rust, the things that can obviously panic are pretty easy to see and are limited (unwrap, expect, indexing, etc.) making it much easier to write robust code, even with a more limited test suite.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#56

Post by the__alchemist »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #41

> Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. I don't doubt this in the least. I've been a professional Python developer for 15 years, and I can't believe Python ever had the reputation for "high dev velocity" beyond toy examples. In every real world code base I've worked in, Python has been a strict liability and the promise that you can "just rewrite the slow…

I think Python shines as an interactive calculator, eg an iPython REPL. Calculations, plotting etc. Or for website backends since Django is very nice. Or scripting OS tasks like file manipulation etc.

For full projects outside websites, Rust for almost every case.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#57

Post by hu3 »

tialaramex wrote: post #31
endisneigh wrote: post #7

Maybe it’s just me but it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows. Rust is great, but modern C++ is great too.

Search your heart, do you think this story ends similarly if they decide to all do "modern C++" instead? My guess is that even with initial discipline in the form of code review and style enforcement by one or two people, the C++ descends into a riot of different opinions about, as usual, which are the good bits. A similar piece of software could be written in C++ but I doubt it gets written successfully, in similar…

> Search your heart, do you think this story ends similarly if they decide to all do "modern C++" instead?

https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#58

Post by eterm »

jraph wrote: post #2

The title is "Inside the Pinecone". "Rust – A hard decision pays off" is only one of the three major subsections of this article.

The title of the section posted is "Rust - A hard decision...".

It's been posted here with the anchor included making it clear that it is that section that has been submitted.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#59

Post by zozbot234 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #56
throwaway894345 wrote: post #41

> Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. I don't doubt this in the least. I've been a professional Python developer for 15 years, and I can't believe Python ever had the reputation for "high dev velocity" beyond toy examples. In every real world code base I've worked in, Python has been a strict liability and the promise that you can "just rewrite the slow…

I think Python shines as an interactive calculator, eg an iPython REPL. Calculations, plotting etc. Or for website backends since Django is very nice. Or scripting OS tasks like file manipulation etc. For full projects outside websites, Rust for almost every case.

Funnily enough, a REPL environment is in the works for Rust: https://github.com/google/evcxr

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#60

Post by benreesman »

Kinrany wrote: post #53
benreesman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Rust deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the notion of “constraints as power”, but excessive enthusiasm around it does seem to obscure the rich traditions of PLT that it has more than liberally borrowed from. There are more rungs on the ladder.

"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many common scenarios, forcing language designers to offer many unsafe escape hatches.

It’s a very valuable thing to be able to separate the mental model one uses from the target machine language.

I worry about the more ardent Rust enthusiasts because it seems popular in those circles to embrace an attitude that we’ve somehow arrived at the right conceptual framework.

Rust is a competent, pragmatic embedding of a few of the big ideas from serious PLT into a well-optimized C++ compiler toolchain, and it’s cool and useful as a result.

But I hope to God it’s not the endgame on fast ML/Haskell/Lisp.

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