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Rust – A hard decision pays off

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Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#181

Post by orangecat »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #65
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…

Yes re: Python. Story -- I was a very early adopter of Python, back in the mid-90s. When other people wrote their CGI scripts in Perl, I always reached for Python. The first paid gig I ever had was a CGI script ("resume builder") I wrote in Python in 1996. But almost nobody was using it back then, and I'd get quizzical stares from people in job interviews etc. when it came up. So for many years back then I really rea…

I agree with most of this, but I would argue that the 2->3 transition was on balance a mistake. Python 3 is better, but not better enough to justify the huge amount of time and resources that otherwise could have been spent on better performance, typing, packaging, tools, etc. I'd gladly trade the Python 3 improvements for Python 2 equivalents of TypeScript and V8.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#182

Post by queuebert »

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…

Dev velocity in Rust is directly proportional to how well you grok lifetimes and ownership.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#183

Post by AndyMcConachie »

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…

I find exception handling in Python to be one of its weakest spots. I really like Python and I use it often. But I'm never quite sure which exceptions a library function might throw. This is rarely documented well and so you end up encountering new exceptions at run time, which is exactly when you do not want to be encountering new thrown exceptions.

Usually I end up looking at source of libraries and making a list of all exceptions that can be thrown. But of course this is also terribly error prone.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#184

Post by charrondev »

s17n wrote: post #177
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…

The unique safety features of Rus are all about memory safety, which is not something you have to worry about at all in Python. I can only assume that the bug classes you are referring to would have been eliminated by using essentially any language with a type system.

I find Rust to have a particularly expressive type system, and a quite strict one to. Not all languages with type systems such have strict enforcement of mutability or null safety.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#185

Post by queuebert »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #158
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 would recommend Rust even if writing a simple tool, the kind of thing I might previously have used python for. We had some data munging to do and someone started it in python. On the real dataset it ran for an hour then ran out of memory. I took a crack in rust, as a n00b rust programmer, and the rust version runs successfully in less than a minute. I haven’t tried server side yet, because the learning curve for th…

Completely agree. Rust shines as a language for small tools that need to be performant and correct, like Unix utilities. Exa and fd are great examples of this.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#186

Post by jnwatson »

t43562 wrote: post #64

Writing something for the second time is a significantly different experience so that makes the conclusion much less definitive to me. Did they need python at all the first time - maybe not. Python "velocity" is, to me, more about the ease with which you can make changes without breaking other code. You can still break other code and if you don't have a proper test suite then you're wasting your time - which is somet…

Yeah. Having runtime errors in a non-trivial Python code base is indicative of poor test coverage.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#188

Post by cmrdporcupine »

orangecat wrote: post #181
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes re: Python. Story -- I was a very early adopter of Python, back in the mid-90s. When other people wrote their CGI scripts in Perl, I always reached for Python. The first paid gig I ever had was a CGI script ("resume builder") I wrote in Python in 1996. But almost nobody was using it back then, and I'd get quizzical stares from people in job interviews etc. when it came up. So for many years back then I really rea…

I agree with most of this, but I would argue that the 2->3 transition was on balance a mistake. Python 3 is better, but not better enough to justify the huge amount of time and resources that otherwise could have been spent on better performance, typing, packaging, tools, etc. I'd gladly trade the Python 3 improvements for Python 2 equivalents of TypeScript and V8.

You are probably right, I'm not invested in enough in that ecosystem to know one way or another. I do know lots of things remain disrupted by this transition in ways that still personally inconvenience me.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#189

Post by deagle50 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #146
johnisgood wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

My favorite thing about learning Rust is how helpful the community is.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#190

Post by dureuill »

benreesman wrote: post #26
bluejekyll wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as someone who likes Rust and wants to like it more: don’t lead with that. The original title appears to be “Inside the Pinecone”, but seeing as they submitted it themselves I’m guessing they wanted the uptick on the Rust. The article itself doesn’t discuss their transition to Rust until the end. So I wouldn’t say they led with it originally, but perhaps didn’t get traction on the original title.

I guess I’m rooting for Rust in the long game sense, which is a different set of imperatives than the hang the hashtag on peripheral stuff sense. I use a lot of great software written in Rust, it’s demonstrably a good vehicle for great software. But too many of its fans are advocates , this can start to seem like an agenda. Don’t take engineering advice from people with an agenda.

I mean, it's only natural.

I have been using C++, Python and Rust professionally, the developer experience is simply one order of magnitude better with Rust. The tooling is excellent, a sane compilation model brings you a lot, the type system is very helpful. Compared with C++, I measured x3 productivity on writing initial code on a project (sometimes C++ was the rewrite, sometimes Rust was, so not this kind of bias). Compounding maintenance, I expect it to tend to 1 order of magnitude in time.

Meanwhile, using Python can sometimes feel magical, but I have to maintain a library written in the language, and I can feel that it hasn't been optimized for this use case. It is terribly hard to keep backward compatibility, adding typing annotations is somewhat useful, but has terrible ergonomics, ensuring no regression is a pain that translates to endless suites of unit tests even for trivial matters ("be your own compiler" will never be a great idea IMO, although tooling like pylance does help a bit).

Meanwhile the rearguard is defending for new projects some kind of "No true Scotsman"ish modern C++ delusion, that I am still looking for and that moves like goalposts in every discussion I have with its proponents. My only explanation for the phenomenon is that it is fueled by hubris and sunk cost biases, because my experience with the modern idioms is that while they bring significant improvements, they are still very subpar compared to the expectations brought forth by a modern language, and memory safety related CVEs are still being written everyday in C++.

So, what should I do? It is true that, in more than 15 years of coding, Rust represents a revolution in programming in my eyes. Should I sit idly while others are missing on it and someone is wrong on the Internet?

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