Side comment but I looked at the documentation, github repo and even code for wick and I still have zero idea what it does. And I am rust developper full time...
Was Rust Worth It?
31–40 of 736 posts
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#32I feel like Rust finally broke the idea that programmers should be in complete control and completely conscious of everything the compiler is doing. It hasn't been that way in decades, compilers are freaking magic. But Rust undid a lot of that with borrowing. People became comfortable with the compiler knowing better than them. I just wish we could relax further: We should never be explicitly iterating forward over a…
I think "not in control of what the compiler is doing" is overstating things a little bit. In some ways, Rust gives the programmer more control than C does. For example, Rust has standardized support for inline assembly, but inline assembly in C relies on vendor-specific extensions.
But to your point, the convenient defaults are very different. Unsafe typecasts require a lot of ceremony and careful thought in Rust, and they have to follow more rules than in C. In particular, references are all effectively "restrict" in Rust, and it's really easy to screw that up when you do unsafe cast from raw pointers to safe references, which is a big incentive not to write code like that if you have a choice.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#33Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use. Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which i…
> Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation I suspect it was less a reaction against anything and more just following the norms established by most other package managers. NPM, PyPI, RubyGems, Elixir's Hex, Haskell's Cabal... I'm having a hard time thinking of a non-Java package manager that was around at the time Rust came out that didn't have a single, global namespace. Some have tried to…
php's composer[0] in 2012 had package namespaces
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#34How do people prefer to compile rust programs offline.
In what way? Rust (cargo technically) might have the best support for offline compilation of any language I use. `cargo vendor` does pretty much everything I want it to.
Also you can download documentation for offline using `cargo doc` so you can easily lookup stuff during a flight. Although you do need to figure out all your dependencies ahead of time so that you download their documentation before you leave.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#35I never programmed in Rust, but I had enough experience in C programming to know that segmentation faults are annoying to debug. I heard Rust prevents memory management problems at compilation level, so it forces you to create safer program. Given this, I want to ask Rust programmers here: For people who have no experience in managing memory at coding stage (basically programmer who have no experience in C-like langu…
I heavily appreciate the simplification of the memory model. I was able to go from comfortable with typescript/js to comfortable with rust with essentially zero knowledge of manual memory allocation in just a few months.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#36Doesn't seem to answer my main question about Rust vs everything else which is what is the more joyful to work in?
It really depends on what your previous programming experience is, if you can state which languages you know now, someone can give a better response to this.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#37"Programming in Rust is like being in an emotionally abusive relationship. Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life. Eventually, you get used to the tantrums. They become routine. You learn to walk the tightrope to avoid triggering the compiler’s temper. And just like in real life, those behavior changes stick with you forever."
This is a pretty negative and unfortunate take on rust that I cannot recognize after having spent the past 2 years professionally writing backend rust. I did write c++ before that so it's likely that it takes some experience with the pain of an unhelpful (and in some cases downright hostile) to fully understand and appreciate the so called "yelling" rust does.
From my perspective every lifetime complaint the compiler has is a deeply appreciated hint that not only saves you countless hours of debugging down the line but also makes me feel confident/safe in the code which you never could achieve in a c++ codebase without making defensive copies everywhere.
Being able to lend/borrow data without fear truely is rust's greatest strength and something people coming from GC languages have a hard time appreciating.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#38I never programmed in Rust, but I had enough experience in C programming to know that segmentation faults are annoying to debug. I heard Rust prevents memory management problems at compilation level, so it forces you to create safer program. Given this, I want to ask Rust programmers here: For people who have no experience in managing memory at coding stage (basically programmer who have no experience in C-like langu…
In that scenario Rust can be attractive because of its high performance compared to languages with a garbage collector. No matter what Java fans will tell you, any runtime with a GC will have worse overall performance for most large codebases than a compiled language with no GC. Sure, microbenchmarks might not look too bad, but complex software is a different matter.
Rust is great for services such as API endpoints, where low latency and high throughput at a low cost are more important that hot reload during development.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#39I never programmed in Rust, but I had enough experience in C programming to know that segmentation faults are annoying to debug. I heard Rust prevents memory management problems at compilation level, so it forces you to create safer program. Given this, I want to ask Rust programmers here: For people who have no experience in managing memory at coding stage (basically programmer who have no experience in C-like langu…
I think so, I wrote an entire video game from scratch in Rust and my experience has been absolutely delightful. I have to manage nulls via Options, cast things explicitly, cannot do dumb stuff like modifying an array while iterating it, etcetera. It’s guiding my code in ways that I wasn’t able to myself, and eventually leading to essentially what is a bug-free game. Imagine!
The experience has been far more than just borrow checking, it’s opened up my mind to a lot of concepts that my previous trials with Java, JavaScript, and Python fully obscured in arcane ways. Rust’s compiler is wonderful, and once you get past the ergonomic struggles (which I did by just going through Advent of Code), you’re set.
Re: Was Rust Worth It?
#40> I started writing tests in Rust as I would in any other language but found that I was writing tests couldn’t fail. This is a common refrain in C++ testing: if it compiles then it's probably correct. > Rust has accounted for so many errors that many common test cases become irrelevant In practice, if you think this way I think it's a sign that you aren't testing the right things in those other languages. You should…
> This is a common refrain in C++ testing: if it compiles then it's probably correct.
I’ve heard this in Haskell and in Rust. I’ve never heard it applied to C++…