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Rust – A hard decision pays off

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Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#141

Post by throwaway894345 »

zmix wrote: post #132
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…

> Use Go if you're looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Why not D?

I haven’t used it. As I mentioned, I’m sure there are other languages that fit the bill besides Go and TypeScript.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#142

Post by mamcx »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #120
lijogdfljk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use Go if you're looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Use Rust if you're writing really high performance or correctness-is-paramount software. I'd add one more addition to use Rust (speaking from an ex-Go dev): Use Rust if you want a robust std lib. Go is good, i used it for ~5 years, but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me…

I actually don't care as much for iterators as I thought I would. Beyond some simpler map().reduce() stuff they tend to fall over pretty fast, and I end up spending too much time trying to make iterator chains work before defaulting to for loops. I also dislike how anemic Rust's stdlib is. I'm sure there are good reasons, but I like that I can just reach for Go's stdlib for annotating errors or dealing with JSON. Oth…

The thing is in Rust this is totally ok. Is NOT un-idiomatic to mix imperative + functional paradigms in the same block.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#143

Post by dls2016 »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #77
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…

> Use Go if you're looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Use Rust if you're writing really high performance or correctness-is-paramount software. I'd add one more addition to use Rust (speaking from an ex-Go dev): Use Rust if you want a robust std lib. Go is good, i used it for ~5 years, but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me…

> but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me solve problems

The tooling is the #1 reason I'd like to learn rust. I have not kept up with C++ and I'm not sure I ever will... sometimes plain C seems more straightforward. But those languages (C++ especially) have suffered from lack of standard tooling, in my opinion.

Even C# being a few years younger than Java seems to have made a huge difference in tooling availability (I'm sure having a single corporate driver during its lifetime made a difference, too).

I'm excited by the prospect of a compiled language with modern tooling.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#144

Post by remram »

moonchrome wrote: post #16
mhaberl wrote: post #10

> ..complex runtime issues which were almost impossible to reproduce or isolate > That’s when internal murmurs about a complete rewrite started brewing… > We decided to move our entire codebase to Rust > there was still one minor problem - no one on the team knew Rust "We have runtime issues so we will fix them by a complete rewrite in a language that no one on the team knows." I would not call that a "hard decision"…

I mean when the tools you know are failing you, you might as well roll the dice.

They could have had some team members learn Rust before deciding that Rust was the right language for the re-write. It feels really risky to do such an important decision only on a high-level view of what you think the language will provide.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#145

Post by remram »

t6jvcereio wrote: post #105

> We decided to move our entire codebase to Rust (and Go for the k8s control plane). > there was still one minor problem - no one on the team knew Rust. Is this real or satire? I can't tell.

It's probably exaggerated. I doubt they committed to the re-write before anyone knew Rust.

Hopefully what they meant is that Rust was only being considered when they started having the team learn it, or that the team was not extremely proficient at it when they picked (but had sufficient knowledge of the language).

Not saying that this part didn't surprise me as well. And if they did commit based only on the marketing material... what a gamble.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#146

Post by throwaway894345 »

johnisgood wrote: post #111
lijogdfljk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use Go if you're looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Use Rust if you're writing really high performance or correctness-is-paramount software. I'd add one more addition to use Rust (speaking from an ex-Go dev): Use Rust if you want a robust std lib. Go is good, i used it for ~5 years, but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me…

When performance and correctness are paramount, I personally stick to Ada/SPARK. Proven to be perfect for the job, and to be honest, Rust is quite a difficult language and I am not sure it is worth learning it considering that Ada/SPARK ticks all boxes when it comes to both low-level and high-level programming for critical systems.

I have fond memories of using Ada in college. Unfortunately it didn’t have much of an open source footprint and the community was downright hostile toward newbies (more so than other communities that I had experienced). I’m sure Ada has the stronger story for real-time embedded systems today, but (as I have learned Rust in the interim) I look forward to the day when Rust breaks into the real-time embedded space. In particular, I’m excited about ferrocene and the broader Rust certification efforts. I would really like to write embedded Rust professionally, and I hope certification will boost the number of embedded Rust jobs (no the to Ada, I just don’t particularly want to re-learn it).

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#147

Post by wazzaps »

wooque wrote: post #94
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…

>with the exception of logic bugs this is one big exception, because logical bugs are most common and most problematic.

If your main concern is security bugs, then according to Microsoft[0] about 70% of their bugs were memory-safety related.

[0]: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe...

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#148

Post by throwaway894345 »

dls2016 wrote: post #143
lijogdfljk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use Go if you're looking for an easy GC language with max productivity and a decent performance ceiling. Use Rust if you're writing really high performance or correctness-is-paramount software. I'd add one more addition to use Rust (speaking from an ex-Go dev): Use Rust if you want a robust std lib. Go is good, i used it for ~5 years, but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me…

> but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me solve problems The tooling is the #1 reason I'd like to learn rust. I have not kept up with C++ and I'm not sure I ever will... sometimes plain C seems more straightforward. But those languages (C++ especially) have suffered from lack of standard tooling, in my opinion. Even C# being a few years younger than Java seems to have made a h…

Tooling was the reason I left C++. Having to do your own package management and script your own build system was deeply dull work. The IDE story was also pretty miserable, although I think clangd has improved it a bit. Getting decent information out of core dumps also sucked a lot. The language actually didn’t bother me too much after c++11, but everything else was such a bear that I jumped ship.

Rust has been very rewarding in that it largely fixes all of C++’s tooling and language problems. It very much is a significantly improved C++.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#149

Post by dfinninger »

gk1 wrote: post #3
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.

Interesting to see the part about Rust getting the most attention. We're giving a talk about it in NYC next week[1] and will definitely follow up with an in-depth writeup. [1] https://www.meetup.com/rust-nyc/events/287821884/

The submitted link auto-scrolls me to the section on Rust, so I guess the submitter wanted to promote that specific section of the article?

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#150

Post by merely-unlikely »

coder543 wrote: post #136
reitanqild wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to a emulating certain teachers dogged insistence of making sure students can't have nice things (an absolute no-brainer feature like generics only showed up recently...!), last time I tried to use Go for a web project a few years ago I was also amused by the lack of templating libraries - the way to make pages was to string together header + main + footer, the old PHP way...! Not a single library support…

Umm... what are you even talking about? Go has had templating built into the standard library since... forever? And Go templates can use other templates, as long as they're all loaded into the same context, if that's what you were getting at. simple examples of Go's built-in templates: https://gowebexamples.com/templates/ templates using other templates: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/using-go-templates-for-effe...

I've found Go's templating to be pretty great
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