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Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#32Technically, the language is excellent. Organizationally, major corporations have invested a lot of resources into it, they won't allow it to fail. Community-wise, there are lots of friendly and supportive people in the quieter corners (this is true most everywhere, I think). That being said, my recommendation for learning systems programming would be to consider trying plain old C first. Rust's safety features are a…
I definitely have to agree with this. C was both easy and hard. Easy because the syntax and stdlib were both simple. Hard because you had to learn pointers/memory management. Also, side note: C != C++.
+1 for C before Rust. It will help you appreciate the logic behind the borrow checker much easier.
Also once you learn C, you never lose C. C will still be around, and it's good knowledge, it's not wasted knowledge. C doesn't really change anymore. You can take it to the grave.
C forces you to have a good understanding of what the hardware does compared to high level languages, but without the assembly grind.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, it's better to learn C first because it forces you to do a lot of painful memory management manually. You tend to really appreciates Rust's features when you understand how things can go wrong. Need absence to value presence.
I kinda disagree, I learned assembly after I learned C and I felt like I still appreciated it
can you please share how you actually learned assembly and the resources you've used for it?
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#34To me, it looks like Rust is suffering from "cool kids syndrome." It's hip right now, and all the cool kids are piling in, or some of the people who have been using it for a while are hoping to cash in social capital. I don't understand this way of using technology or being in this profession; self promotion and dialogue through twitter, blog posting all over the place, conferences, panels, books, speaking tours, ego…
For some, programming is a lifestyle, and a culture, and has nothing to do with getting paid.
In my experience, these people and their projects tend to be more interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#35[flagged]
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Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#36[flagged]
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That wasn’t the point nor even an offhand comment in their post.
C++ is fine and has a lot of libraries built up — especially around image processing. It will be quite some time before Rust replaces C++. But if I had time to learn only one sugary C, it’d be Rust.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#37Technically, the language is excellent. Organizationally, major corporations have invested a lot of resources into it, they won't allow it to fail. Community-wise, there are lots of friendly and supportive people in the quieter corners (this is true most everywhere, I think). That being said, my recommendation for learning systems programming would be to consider trying plain old C first. Rust's safety features are a…
> Rust's safety features are a godsend, but IMO easier to understand once you have experienced working without them. Passing around a pointer becomes passing around a borrow or a Mutex or Arc >. Not sure how you'd summarize Rc or Box
Well, it depends on what you define by passing a pointer. Is the pointer mutable (needs to modify the data it is pointing at?) or immutable? Is it a reference ("guaranteed" pointer?) Or just a plain old pointer? (const T and mut T)? Or do you want a smart pointer, like Box or a unique_ptr-ish thing with a reference counted pointer via Rc?
Want to pass and modify data from and to multiple threads? Yea just drop an Arc> and you're good to go. If you just want to pass some data, even around threads, without modifying it, then a plain old borrow is your best bet. Make sure to get the lifetimes right tho!
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#38[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That wasn’t the point nor even an offhand comment in their post. C++ is fine and has a lot of libraries built up — especially around image processing. It will be quite some time before Rust replaces C++. But if I had time to learn only one sugary C, it’d be Rust.
> Avoid C++
Seems offhand
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#40IMHO, one should make one's language choices based on utility and NOT solely on metacharacteristics such as quality of governance, DEI efforts, or nation of origin. None of these things matter when the program is run, if the process and end result do not solve the problem(s) at hand. Thorough feature discussion, appropriate licensing, and accessibility of source code for risk evaluation are metacharacteristics that a…
solely I agree with that, but that stuff you mention is still a factor. Politics is creeping into everything, and there are lots of reasons why choosing a relatively politically stable language is important, though obviously not the only factor. I think the best one could hope for is a lot of diverse groups with different political views and motivations being invested in the future of a language, so that despite any…
Heh Heh Heh
New potential language feature: "Not created nor maintained by Americans". ;) (/s)
Though that in itself potentially opens up other cans of worms, some of which could also be not good.