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Rust – A hard decision pays off

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Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#81

Post by benreesman »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #67
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.

I say this as someone who has had a lot of criticism for Rust: Rust definitely borrows a lot from other languages, but Rust deserves praise precisely because it curates the right features and composes them in the right way. There are way too many languages from the PLT space that add some neat type system innovation, but they fail on syntax or performance or tooling or etc. That's not particularly laudable IMO, but R…

Credit where credit is due: Rust has done a far better job than most of free-riding on Haskell’s type class system and clang’s optimizer, but rust-analyzer is a dumpster fire next to clangd, that’s not an example I’d use.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#82

Post by golergka »

nazka wrote: post #70
golergka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard generally good things about TypeScript, but I'd be concerned about its performance even if it is better than Python I wouldn't recommend Typescript for CPU-bound tasks, but for I/O-bound tasks with complicated business logic it's type system is on the order of magnitude better than Go, and makes you able to get really close to the "make invalid states of the system a type error" ideal of functional langu…

Talking about Haskell and stuff. You what I want? Rescript to replace entirely Typescript. That will be so much better.

Personally, I love ML-family languages and would enjoy writing in Rescript more, indeed.

But I write software not to enjoy the process, but to solve business needs. And using Rescript, Scheme or Haskell drastically limits the talent pool and rises the cost. Which, BTW, can be very good for some businesses, that would want to hire only the best programmers anyway and are ready to pay for it. But that's some, not all.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#83

Post by AtNightWeCode »

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…

Docker is built with Go. Compare doing things with Docker api between Go and Python. I usually recommend people to "script" things with Go but I start to think that Go has to go...

https://docs.docker.com/engine/api/sdk/examples/

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#84

Post by golergka »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #75
golergka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard generally good things about TypeScript, but I'd be concerned about its performance even if it is better than Python I wouldn't recommend Typescript for CPU-bound tasks, but for I/O-bound tasks with complicated business logic it's type system is on the order of magnitude better than Go, and makes you able to get really close to the "make invalid states of the system a type error" ideal of functional langu…

I sort of agree, but I also think type systems are somewhat overrated compared to performance, static compilation, native compilation, easy cross compilation, good tooling, expansive ecosystem (esp devoid of C dependencies). I think TS and Go are on par with respect to tooling and ecosystem, but I would rarely trade Go's static, native compilation model (distributing a single static binary is pretty awesome) for some…

> distributing a single static binary is pretty awesome

It is, but does it really matter when you write backend? I've written and operated Node-based backends at scale, and I can't honestly remember any bugs or outages that would have been prevented by this.

At the other hand, there's a lot of potential bugs and problems that didn't happen because proper usage of TS's type system prevented me from committing them.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#85

Post by tialaramex »

benreesman wrote: post #60
Kinrany wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'd be disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire (perhaps a decade or at most two in the future) is Rust. We can surely do better.

But I'd be even more disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire isn't even Rust.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#86

Post by Xorlev »

brightball wrote: post #74
nu11ptr wrote: post #55

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 MU…

That’s why Elixir developers like to make NIF callouts with Rust. It’s dangerous to do anything outside of the BEAM but Rust negates all of those concerns.

Maybe not all concerns, you're still allocating memory outside of BEAM and you still need to be careful to yield control on longer-running NIFs.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#87

Post by UncleEntity »

cratermoon wrote: post #17
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.

> it seems irresponsible to move your entire team to a programming language none of them knows Based on my experiences, I would agree. There seems to be a very important difference between my experiences, which probably align with most of the industry, and the Pinecone team. My career has been working with average developers doing ordinary business and internet things. Stuff that takes organization and teamwork, but…

If you start the article at the top instead of where the hot link points (which is its own discussion) it starts by talking about mathematically proving why this form of database is faster than theory suggests it to be. Definitely not your average boot camp devs working on this one.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#88

Post by zaphar »

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…

Python has high dev velocity if you only measure how quickly you can get started on a project. The dev velocity drops exponentially with the size and complexity of your codebase.

But it is indeed quite fast when you are just trying to get your first file of code written.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#89

Post by UncleEntity »

ncmncm wrote: post #69
mynameisash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 her…

> breaking into the Linux codebase Is Linux really your go-to example? Linus is noted for his irrational hostility to C++. His complaints are proved silly or, at best, obsolete by the example of Serenity OS. An example of a measure to make the language easier to adopt is to allow borrow violations to be made a warning when building in debug mode. All violations would need to be patched up before release anyway, so it…

It seems like a bad idea to allow what is arguably the main selling point of the language to be turned off by a compiler flag so someone can build the rest of their program on top of that shaky foundation.

Whole hog or no hog, this is the rust way.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#90

Post by mustache_kimono »

benreesman wrote: post #81
throwaway894345 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who has had a lot of criticism for Rust: Rust definitely borrows a lot from other languages, but Rust deserves praise precisely because it curates the right features and composes them in the right way. There are way too many languages from the PLT space that add some neat type system innovation, but they fail on syntax or performance or tooling or etc. That's not particularly laudable IMO, but R…

Credit where credit is due: Rust has done a far better job than most of free-riding on Haskell’s type class system and clang’s optimizer, but rust-analyzer is a dumpster fire next to clangd, that’s not an example I’d use.

Um what?

Maybe it's just that I don't understand what clangd provides that's so great, but rust-analyzer, despite a few hiccups I've had with it, seems completely amazing at what it does.

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