The Rust I wanted had no future
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The Rust I wanted had no future
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Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#2A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either.
I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today.
Very interesting article, worth a read.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#3A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either. I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today. Very interesting article, worth a read.
One highlight from the article:
> Traits. I generally don't like traits / typeclasses. To my eyes they're too type-directed, too global, too much like programming and debugging a distributed set of invisible inference rules, and produce too much coupling between libraries in terms of what is or isn't allowed to maintain coherence.
Very much this!
> I wanted (and got part way into building) a first class module system in the ML tradition. Many team members objected because these systems are more verbose, often painfully so, and I lost the argument. But I still don't like the result, and I would probably have backed the experiment out "if I'd been BDFL".
I seen this the ML first class module system mentioned in a few different contexts and want to pick it up at some point.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#4A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either. I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today. Very interesting article, worth a read.
Committees tend to design less beautiful things. Look at modern c++ too. What a mess. Everyone in the committee has to jam in their favorite feature, much of which is sugar.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#5A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either. I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today. Very interesting article, worth a read.
Committees tend to design less beautiful things. Look at modern c++ too. What a mess. Everyone in the committee has to jam in their favorite feature, much of which is sugar.
Modern C++ is actually going relatively OK? You may be thinking of the old, pre-C++11 C++?
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#6Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It's a good language.
That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I know how it works behind the scene (thanks to Jon Gjengset [1]), it feels so complicated and hacky, a mediocre very high level concept that someone managed to implement as a zero-cost abstraction. Impressive, but still a bad idea.
I'm sure the pro of having a BDFL instead of a committee is being able to follow a singular vision, instead of trying to appease members by adding the fad du jour which might stray a little too far from the original vision. Too many chefs in the kitchen and all.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#7A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either. I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today. Very interesting article, worth a read.
I am very glad to not have Rust end up along that path (I am sympathetic to the threading idea he mentioned though).
Rust as an alternative to C++ does, for me, involve all of the weird magical nonsense that you kind of need to get any of this working. The extreme use of generics to build out DSLs to get things working. General libraries being very hard to write, but still possible, to get alright ergonomics for usage itself. And yeah... the zero-cost abstraction thing.
I think Graydon-Rust would have also been very interesting, but it sounds unappealing to me, person who wants "C++ but nicer".
But to his point... saying "you could have much faster compile times" is very tempting! Just, especially when it's messing around with Rust "for fun", the ergonomics sound pretty unfun.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#8As someone casually following Rust and haven't touched it or C++ in probably 5+ years (but keeping tabs in hope of coming back to that world), I feel like a lot of decisions he mentions are what made me optimistic about Rust adoption/positioning itself as a modern C++ replacement. So I kind of agree with his conclusion - his version of Rust would be much less interesting to me, and I think a lot of it's current users. eg. I only started playing with Rust once they removed green threads. Zero cost abstractions are a major selling point.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#9Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It's a good language. That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I kno…
> I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++
I stopped paying attention to the language around 2012-2013 or so when the direction clearly steered towards the latter.
You may want to check https://austral-lang.org/ out.
Re: The Rust I wanted had no future
#10As someone casually following Rust and haven't touched it or C++ in probably 5+ years (but keeping tabs in hope of coming back to that world), I feel like a lot of decisions he mentions are what made me optimistic about Rust adoption/positioning itself as a modern C++ replacement. So I kind of agree with his conclusion - his version of Rust would be much less interesting to me, and I think a lot of it's current users…
I was at the sidelines when Rust 1.0 was being made and I think it got into an llvm induced feedback loop. Slowly turning into C or C++ with other features but the same type, object and memory model.
Part of the reason was Rust's desire to show itself as a direct competitor w.r.t performance, I think.