The Rust I wanted had no future • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#191

Post by xiphias2 » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #169

xiphias2 wrote: post #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 langua…

Rust does make compromises of performance. That is not always bad so long as the compromises are minor. Fortunately Rust can do most of the checking at compile time, but it if you read from an empty vector Rust doesn't have undefined behavior and that means there is a runtime check of some sort in at least some cases. The trick is to find the right place to compromise so the cost is minimal overall even if it isn't z…

Dropping to unsafe rust is quite easy as long as you understand what you're doing (and reading pointer is generally unsafe).

In the case of automatically upgrading from int to bignum, or green threads, going lower level would be much harder.

I just wish Rust stayed focused on being the best systems level programming language (for example finishing the SIMD package, getting into stable Rust, getting language level GPU integration similar to CUDA / OpenCL).

PyToch, and now the newer GGML for example is still written in C++ for example

I still like the changes being made in the language, just not the focus.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#192

Post by sheepscreek » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

I’ll get straight to the point I want to make: Rust is suffering from an identity crisis. Much like Javascript.

Realizing this, I thoroughly feel the need for a “Rust, the good parts” doctrine.

A good portion of use-cases could be successfully implemented with a small subset of language. The small subset doesn’t need to be any more complicated than Go. And in doing so, we’d be reducing the entry barrier for masses and encouraging wider adoption.

Edited: For clarity

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#193

Post by osigurdson » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #6

Very 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 think a big part of any successful endeavour is alignment of authority, responsibility and competence. The problem with group decision making is responsibility is very diluted. If a bad decision is made, no one in particular is responsible.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#194

Post by thiht » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:21 PM UTC

viscanti wrote: post #176

bazoom42 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said... python had a BDFL and look how that turned out. One of the most popular and succesful languages, and a major force in AI innovation?

The py2 to py3 transition seems to have gone very poorly, although most of the pain from that is behind us now.

Honestly I blame the community.

The transition was slow (Python 2 was supported in parallel to 3 for a long period of time so there was more than enough time to migrate), relatively easy to do, and brought huge benefits to the ecosystem.

It could have been done and forgotten in 2 years if some community members had not been dicks about it.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#195

Post by MontagFTB » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

> Not 100% clear about actors -- I was weirdly focused on that model that in practice has many issues…

Any ideas what he meant here?

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#196

Post by amelius » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:25 PM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #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 langua…

OCaml?

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#197

Post by hadrien01 » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #168

anonyfox wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

C# is horribly OOP. I use it in my day job, and the frameworks wield OOP overcomplexity proudly. It has likely gone beyond Java as the posterchild for OOP: interfaces that are implemented once, classes that are instantiated once. You can't get away from it either, it is practically part of the stdlib and everyone cargocults it. Rust is imperative too, though.

The language doesn't push you towards interfaces implemented once, but many developers indeed persist doing it for no reason at all. With proper code review we're able to make that practice go away on the projects I'm working on.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#198

Post by pclmulqdq » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #113

davedx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That being said... python had a BDFL and look how that turned out. I think designing and evolving any living programming language is just one of the hardest problems out there. Incredible blog post indeed, was awesome to read it.

A dictator might just have terrible ideas. His dislike for functional constructs didn't do Python any favour, but now that he's gone I see Python is adding the kitchen sink as well. I haven't kept up with the language since that pattern matching proposal.

People who are deeply into programming languages seem to like FP too much. That and theories of type systems. Python is doing some great things, but also just fucking around a lot.

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#199

Post by laeri » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:37 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #110

Over the evolution of Rust, I've been increasingly despairing about many of the things Graydon here dislikes. I assumed the present "syntactical insanity" was, somehow, intended; it seems, really, it wasn't. I find Rust basically unusable -- at the level of abstraction I want to write code, basic definitions break line limits. Rust seems to be a repetition of C++'s mistake: a language which conspires you to pretend i…

Can you give an example where Rust is unusable? I have been getting into Rust recently and it feels very natural after getting accustomed to dealing with `Result` and `Option`. And what do you mean about "a langauge which conspires you to pretend it's another"?

Re: The Rust I wanted had no future

#200

Post by FpUser » Mon, Jun 05, 2023, 1:42 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #17

kzrdude wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Performance, but with sanity. Say you use a vector in C++. You push one element and pop two. In Rust that's a None. In C++ the answer is UB (in my case 43).

And what should be defined behavior? There are quite a few choices that depend on particular situations. Feature designers have no knowledge about what would you want so they left it up to application programmer to check the situation upfront and act accordingly to their wishes. If you want same behavior across the whole application you can always write generic function doing just that.