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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#51

Post by MereInterest »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #16

I 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’m not sure. Looking through different Rust libraries, I tend to see three different styles, depending on previous programming experience. Each mimics the prior experience, with benefits.

* Everything is a struct with concrete types. This is closest to C. It benefits from the improved memory safety, without sacrificing speed.

* Everything is a Box>. This is closest to dynamic garbage-collected languages, but with vastly improved performance.

* Everything is an “impl Trait”. This is closest to templated C++, but with much better ergonomics.

So, while I think I agree with your specific statement that the improved memory management may only be fully appreciated by those that cut their teeth on C’s segfaults and dangling pointers, I don’t think that’s the only benefit of Rust as a language.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#52

Post by spullara »

yarg wrote: post #20
chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps 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…

This needs to be resolved by every damned language. Just make signed dependencies a universal default, point to an https page for the package vendor and use the signing key from there. Neither node nor maven ever bothered to solve this, so we end up wandering the Wild West wondering when it will be that HR, or legal, or architecture comes knocking on the door to ask what we were thinking having a dependency on a dyna…

To be fair, all the dependencies in the maven central repository require a signature to publish them.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#53

Post by bogwog »

Do you need memory safety? Then why use Rust when you could use Java, JS, Python, etc? You can't "disable" memory safety in those languages.

Do you need bare metal performance? Then why use Rust when you could use C or C++, which have much larger ecosystems, platform support, more mature tooling, etc.

Do you need BOTH memory safety and baremetal performance at the same time? Then there really aren't many other options besides Rust.

But what I've started wondering lately is: are there really that many situations where you actually need both of those things at the same time? C++ tends to get misused a lot, but I feel like the same thing is happening with Rust.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#54

Post by ModernMech »

Analemma_ wrote: post #47
Zagitta wrote: post #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…

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but a little quip I've used when talking about developing in Rust vs. other languages is, it's a question of where/when do you want the pain. In Rust, it's at development time (and hiring and ramp-up time); in C++ it's at runtime; and with GC languages it's at billing time when you have to pay for that extra compute and RAM. There's no way to get rid of the pain entirely.

Yes but there’s a difference in who feels the pain. Compile time pain is felt by devs, who have the constitution and ability to fix such issues. Runtime pain is felt by users and can result in data loss and security issues in the wild, and is harder to debug.

One kind of pain has a bigger blast radius than the other. I prefer compile time pain to runtime pain.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#55

Post by selcuka »

lolinder wrote: post #9
chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps 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…

> 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.

Technically not in the same category, but Docker Hub (2014) had namespaces.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#56

Post by starttoaster »

treyd wrote: post #12
rochak wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go made a great decision to namespace packages via this Github style.

And the horrible decision to not make library-level ("module") and code-unit-level ("package") namespacing orthogonal. The former was an afterthought tacked on since the package system was designed to be used only within Google's monorepo and little care was paid to how it would work when it was released to the public and used more generally.

I want to understand what you just said, but I fear watering your language down a bit might be a tall ask with some people. Would you be willing to eli5 what you believe Go did that was a horrible decision with regards to module/package namespacing?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#57

Post by avgcorrection »

bojo wrote: post #46
anon776 wrote: post #4

"Rust has its warts". Interesting terminology.

This is a fairly common idiom, "X has its warts." Or do you mean something else?

Can’t really accuse programmers of being creative with words and phrases. Most of them will be rehashes of blogs and memes from the last couple of decades.

But maybe I’m bikeshedding by saying that.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#58

Post by RagnarD »

I continue to be delighted by indications that real high level languages compiling to Webassembly are supplanting the godforsaken nightmare of JavaScript. I think anyone focusing solely on JS is overdue for looking at those languages and getting up to speed on the huge differences before they wake up to find that the market for making and fixing kerosene lamps has been replaced by fusion reactors.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#60

Post by yarg »

spullara wrote: post #52
yarg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs to be resolved by every damned language. Just make signed dependencies a universal default, point to an https page for the package vendor and use the signing key from there. Neither node nor maven ever bothered to solve this, so we end up wandering the Wild West wondering when it will be that HR, or legal, or architecture comes knocking on the door to ask what we were thinking having a dependency on a dyna…

To be fair, all the dependencies in the maven central repository require a signature to publish them.

That's a workaround.

I'm not a fan of those - if the engine's in the wrong place, then why the hell did you fucking put it there?

Don't hack a patch into place to stop people from holding it wrong; design it in such a way that it's impossible to hold wrong in the first place.

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