Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rust – A hard decision pays off

pinecone.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 386 posts

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#201

Post by mwcampbell »

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 don't believe I've been an over-the-top Rust advocate so far. But I use Rust, I like it so far, and I want to use it more. For me to be able to use it more, it would help if it had the good attributes of a popular language, including a broad ecosystem of libraries and relative ease of hiring developers. So I want Rust to be a popular language. That means winning at the short game. Maybe other Rust advocates have a similar motivation to mine.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#202

Post by nu11ptr »

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…

There is no need to force something iterator style. By all means use a loop if it is more readable. Also, if your iterator style closure body gets very verbose, you can always pull the logic out into a function or closure and pass it in. In the end, both styles are idiomatic, and the best choice is which makes it more readable (subjective of course).

I personally use iterator-style for 1-3 simple ops, but go into a loop for anything more complicated. The functional part of me wants to force iterator style but I fight it for complex use cases because it is irrational on my part, and I find loops easier to read for stuff like that.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#203

Post by Thaxll »

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…

Rust std lib is subpar compared to the Go one, yes you have iterators but that's it, basic things like async are not even provided just the interface so everyone has to use tokyo. Then for real use cases you're missing http/json/compression/crypto etc ...

https://pkg.go.dev/std

Overall tooling and std lib are better on Go, actually there are not many languages that are on part with Go to that regard.

When you see what you can do with the single go command, it's pretty powerful.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#204

Post by Alexendoo »

tialaramex wrote: post #179
sgeisenh wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how you write it, iterators are much better at this since most iterator methods produce iterators with size hints. If you use "take" for example, collect should do the right thing: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/iter/adapters/take.rs.htm...

Mere hints aren't enough for collect() It will only care about your hints if you implement the unsafe trait TrustedLen (which promises those hints are correct) Take is indeed TrustedLen if the Iterator it's taking from is TrustedLen (as in this case it can be sure of the size hint) If you get to ~100 via some means other than take()ing 100 of them, chances are you don't have TrustedLen as a result.

TrustedLen will mean it can safely take the upper bound, but Vec for example will still use the lower bound of the hint when something isn't TrustedLen

https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/vec/spec_from_iter_neste...

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#205

Post by kylereeve »

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.

Do you work in Ada/SPARK professionally? Curious what industry if so.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#206

Post by wooque »

wazzaps wrote: post #147
wooque wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Most people don't write operating systems or write software in C/C++, so memory safety bugs are not big concern.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#207

Post by sharno »

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'd argue that C# (dotnet core) is a much better option than Go for an easy GC language with max productivity and great performance ceiling.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#208

Post by coder543 »

reitanqild wrote: post #191
coder543 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn't look too bad on a quick glance, but the possibility to say that "this content goes in that template" still seems to be missing. Look at this page: https://quarkus.io/guides/qute-reference and read about “Template inheritance” in 3.5.6 to see what I mean.

In this example, I'm passing an object with a single value into the header template, but it could have as many values in it as needed: https://go.dev/play/p/kC8pm4Z4WrH

Go doesn't really do template inheritance in the way I think you're meaning. Go prefers composition over inheritance, and that carries over to the templating system. Go templates let you pass a parameter to the template you're calling, which I believe addresses the need you linked to. Calling another template is not just simple string concatenation; the other template can act on input provided by the calling template.

There are a lot of different ways to approach templating pages in a web app. I think Go's templating system is one of the least objectionable ones I've used.

I have no experience with Quarkus, so I can't say how good or bad that one is, but my experience with Ruby templating systems is that people often start mixing complex logic into the templates, including database calls, and that causes things to get messy. Go's template environment is very minimal by default, and you can extend it with custom functions if you want to give more power to the templates, but Go encourages you to compute your data ahead of time, then pass it into the template... and just have your template be a template for formatting the data.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#209

Post by zeroc8 »

AmpsterMan wrote: post #176
throwaway894345 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just fucking really hate Go. As a Go fanboy, this made me chuckle. :) > I can't explain it, but I find the language infuriating. It somehow manages to be less expressive, more verbose and more straight up boring than all the other options. I sort of get it. I think people fixate too much on the for loops and the `if err != nil` boilerplate, but there's definitely some validity with respect to "how to properly ann…

I am still fairly early in my career. I've worked mostly in Java, but my current job is a mix of Python for E2E testing, PHP and JS for application work. Go is my preferred language for tools. My favorite language is by far Java with Go a close second. I dislike the others. The only thing I wish Go had is more functional support, but only in the style of Java's fluent API. I strongly dislike PHP, JS, and Python funct…

I on the other hand like the fact that Go keeps things simple and primitive.

Don't need those functional constructs at all, allthough I'm using them quite often in Typescript.

But for Go - please no. Go is like C. Adding things just makes it worse.

Re: Rust – A hard decision pays off

#210

Post by 3pt14159 »

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 disagree.

Most startups that YC has funded that became successful (Series B or higher) were written in Python or Ruby. Now you can say that this is a tradeoff for post Series B, and for that I don't know. I've never worked on a massive Python mono-repo for a company that size. But I know what I've done in Python and, yes, it includes performance optimization in Numpy / Scipy / Cython, and other than Ruby, no other language comes close to the developer performance I see with Python and the ecosystem around it.

That said, there is a good and a bad way of writing Python. You absolutely need tests and lots of them since there is no compiler for vanilla Python. Mypy helps a ton too and so do the linters and even Black. Also, get pdb++ and customize it. The tooling helps a lot.

Now I haven't ever written production Rust, but I have for Go and many other languages, and so Rust may be faster, but other than Ruby I haven't seen anything close.

Post reply on HN