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The Rust I wanted had no future

graydon2.dreamwidth.org

141–150 of 523 posts

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#141

Haven't followed Rust too much, but I'm always surprised when I hear that Rust is too difficult or not ergonomic. As I understand it is meant to be a systems level language; something you'd use to write kernels, TCP stacks, browsers and ssh daemons. Anyone writing these things today in C or C++ already understands object lifetimes and Rust just adds a static checker for them. In such projects churning out lines of co…

> Why on earth would you try to rewrite python CRUD apps in Rust?

Because Rust has a lot of incredibly helpful features that make bigger systems far less of a pain to maintain. I work in Java/Kotlin, and my entirely gut-based estimate is that 66% of problems wouldn't happen in Rust.

My big favorites are: - Sane, well-defined, enforced, opt-out error handling - Sane, well-defined, enforced, opt-out handling of "missing" values - Exhaustive switching - WITH usable ADTs (enums) for encoding valid state

None of the web languages I know have all of that.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#142
,,I would have traded performance and expressivity away for simplicity''

,,A lot of people in the Rust community think "zero cost abstraction" is a core promise of the language. I would never have pitched this and still, personally, don't think it's good''

If the language makes compromises in performance, it's not a real C++ competitor anymore.

Some things are not about what people ,,like'', but that we need a language that is safe and can compete with C/C++ in performance for systems level programming, as most security problems in the world come from C/C++ memory management.

If it's significantly slower than C++, Mozilla couldn't have picked it up to replace C++ code base, as there was a huge competition in performance between browsers.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#143
I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the language itself personally.

If there would be something just like Go, but with a bit more powerful typesystem like Rust has (Option instead of `err != nil`, and so on), and a simplified ML-like language instead of an imperative one... that would be my dream.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#144

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

Yeah, that is exactly what I want for when I build web applications. Something with an ecosystem like Rust's, with more advanced type system than go but which sacrifices some performance for ease of development.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case? Basically none of Rust's value proposition exists for a web app while nearly every single one of the downsides do.

Hard disagree. Rust brings a lot to the table for a web app. Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. You can even go as far as compiled templates. Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great . Dependency management is best in class. I rather like diesel.rs (although it is very much an acquired taste) especially if you treat it like a safe query builder rather tha…

> Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. ... Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great

cough C#. You also get LINQ. And a fairly heavy amount of web frameworks in ASP.NET / Razor.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#146

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

Have you dismissed F# ?

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#147

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

You could try C# (or Kotlin if you have a MS bias ;-)). Both really nice general purpose languages, quite performant despite having a GC and great available tooling.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#148

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

Have you dismissed F# ?

I would like to second F#. It seems to have a lot of what people want, so why isn't it more popular?

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#149

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

Have you dismissed F# ?

Unfortunately a lot of people will dismiss C# and F# just because it has the Microsoft label. I do think they're missing out.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#150
post #147

I love Rust and built some production code with it in the past. But nowadays I want something more simple so that not-so-senior developers can pick it up quickly, and I want flawless tooling, and willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. So basically I often end up with Go. Go is exceptionally great in tooling, ecosystem, any objective metrics like build times or crosscompilation... but I still don't like the langua…

You could try C# (or Kotlin if you have a MS bias ;-)). Both really nice general purpose languages, quite performant despite having a GC and great available tooling.

I think I still would have to deal with a lot of OOP and imperative code there, C# feels like a kitchen sink of stuff - right?
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