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Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

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Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#121

Post by lolinder »

jmartin2683 wrote: post #71
planetis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain to us what's the bigger problem we should be addressing according to your opinion sir?

You’re creating lots and lots of bugs that will come back to haunt to at runtime (midnight on a Friday if the universe has its way).

You're assuming everyone is coming to Rust from C. People who are learning Rust from a garbage-collected language will absolutely feel that Rust is harder than what they're used to, and not because they were writing bug-ridden code in Java or whatever.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#122

Post by v3ss0n »

Nim still need a lot of time to mature, there are totally ridiculous decision of things that core things have done like style insensitivity and half a decade old serious bugs that Nim team ignore to fix cause Nim adoption to low. 5 years ago it was on rival to rust but now rust had sky rocketed and Nim community is having a lot of in fighting going.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#123

Post by francasso »

nu11ptr wrote: post #115

> Rust: I'm not afraid to admit it - Rust is just too complicated for use as an aging and cranky solo developer. ... > As someone who actually hates to code for coding's sake and wants to Get Sh!t Done, Rust is just antithetical to my relationship with computers. I don't want to have to think about the language, and that's all Rust wants you to think about. My guess: the author hasn't even tried it other than a curso…

I have written around 30k+ lines of rust by now, and I have to agree with OP. I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C, it basically impossible to replicate in Rust (or at least I am not clever enough to figure it out). Are there other ways to structure the data that work in Rust? Yes, of course. Do I like them compared to the C one? No, not at all. Do I think that the additional memory safety that comes from Rust is worth it? In some use cases, yes

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#124

Post by julianeon »

lamontcg wrote: post #98

> Rust: I'm not afraid to admit it - Rust is just too complicated for use as an aging and cranky solo developer. I'm nearly 51 and currently learning Rust. The first 10 hours of it were horribly slow, but it isn't as steep of a learning curve as Optimal Control Theory.

I'm close in age to you but that was one part of the article that resonate w me.

I'm often writing little scripts for my computer or things that a dozen people will use, if I'm lucky. If the program 'crashes' it barely matters.

It feels like, in Rust, I have to carefully choose my data type and use the applicable methods (not always intuitive), whereas in Nim or Go, I can basically just slap something together and then have an error condition which is like 'if you die, just print that you died and quit.' And that pretty much meets my needs. The extra safety isn't actually protecting anything valuable, in my case.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#125

Post by insanitybit »

francasso wrote: post #123
nu11ptr wrote: post #115

> Rust: I'm not afraid to admit it - Rust is just too complicated for use as an aging and cranky solo developer. ... > As someone who actually hates to code for coding's sake and wants to Get Sh!t Done, Rust is just antithetical to my relationship with computers. I don't want to have to think about the language, and that's all Rust wants you to think about. My guess: the author hasn't even tried it other than a curso…

I have written around 30k+ lines of rust by now, and I have to agree with OP. I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C, it basically impossible to replicate in Rust (or at least I am not clever enough to figure it out). Are there other ways to structure the data that work in Rust? Yes, of course. Do I like them comp…

If you were clever enough to write it safely in C I can guarantee you'd be clever enough to write it in Rust.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#126

Post by nu11ptr »

francasso wrote: post #123
nu11ptr wrote: post #115

> Rust: I'm not afraid to admit it - Rust is just too complicated for use as an aging and cranky solo developer. ... > As someone who actually hates to code for coding's sake and wants to Get Sh!t Done, Rust is just antithetical to my relationship with computers. I don't want to have to think about the language, and that's all Rust wants you to think about. My guess: the author hasn't even tried it other than a curso…

I have written around 30k+ lines of rust by now, and I have to agree with OP. I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C, it basically impossible to replicate in Rust (or at least I am not clever enough to figure it out). Are there other ways to structure the data that work in Rust? Yes, of course. Do I like them comp…

I have written about 50K LoC of Rust, so fairly similar. I will agree that I have had occasional "lost days" with some very complex spots of code that would not have been a problem in a GC language. That said, I feel like I've made up for that at least 1.5-2x by my productivity and lack of bugs in other sections.

That said, I can understand how it may not be for everyone. I love it, but there are some data structures you just have to code differently, and until you spend time thinking about how to do that, it would seem like wasted time you wouldn't get back.

My personality may also be a fit: I'm very much a measure twice, cut once kind of person. I tend write my algorithms in pseudo code and sketch my data structures on paper before I touch the keyboard, so even in my "get it done" language I don't immediately just start coding always.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#127

Post by lolinder »

ilovecaching wrote: post #13

The best language to learn and use right now for systems programming is C/C++. It is by far the most marketable skill with 99.999999% of all low level systems written in C or C++. Large scale systems used by companies that pay top salaries for developers (Google/Meta) are written in C++. There is more material out there for learning and mastering these languages than any other language save maybe Python or JavaScript…

Not everyone is interested in maximizing their income. A lot of us here got into programming because we really do just like to code.

For us, it's worth sacrificing $x thousand per year to write code in a fun language that makes us happy. Your condescension toward that decision says more about your priorities than it does about ours.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#128

Post by francasso »

insanitybit wrote: post #125
francasso wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have written around 30k+ lines of rust by now, and I have to agree with OP. I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C, it basically impossible to replicate in Rust (or at least I am not clever enough to figure it out). Are there other ways to structure the data that work in Rust? Yes, of course. Do I like them comp…

If you were clever enough to write it safely in C I can guarantee you'd be clever enough to write it in Rust.

Oh boy, that is so not true. Anything where the boundaries of the lifetimes are easily determined at runtime but unknown at compile time is extremely easy to model safely in C, and a nightmare in Rust. At least if you want the same level of performance and a similar modeling of the data

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#129

Post by root_axis »

francasso wrote: post #123
nu11ptr wrote: post #115

> Rust: I'm not afraid to admit it - Rust is just too complicated for use as an aging and cranky solo developer. ... > As someone who actually hates to code for coding's sake and wants to Get Sh!t Done, Rust is just antithetical to my relationship with computers. I don't want to have to think about the language, and that's all Rust wants you to think about. My guess: the author hasn't even tried it other than a curso…

I have written around 30k+ lines of rust by now, and I have to agree with OP. I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C, it basically impossible to replicate in Rust (or at least I am not clever enough to figure it out). Are there other ways to structure the data that work in Rust? Yes, of course. Do I like them comp…

> I have encountered many situations where perfectly reasonable, zero copy, memory management that would be completely normal, fast and safe in C

So you think. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are, statistically speaking you're not smarter than a compiler.

Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages

#130

Post by nu11ptr »

francasso wrote: post #128
insanitybit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were clever enough to write it safely in C I can guarantee you'd be clever enough to write it in Rust.

Oh boy, that is so not true. Anything where the boundaries of the lifetimes are easily determined at runtime but unknown at compile time is extremely easy to model safely in C, and a nightmare in Rust. At least if you want the same level of performance and a similar modeling of the data

Rust lifetimes are just the lifetimes of the memory, exactly the same as C. The only difference is you simply need to (sometimes) tell Rust where the memory for a reference comes from explicitly, where as in C you don't (but in C if you get it wrong your program will segfault, unlike Rust, or worse it might not...sometimes).
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