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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#61

Post by lolinder »

thirdplace_ wrote: post #33
lolinder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 [0] https://getcomposer.org/

Sorta—it looks like they were mostly just using that system by convention until May 2015, when they finally become enforced [0]. Still, that's a good one that I hadn't thought of, and they at least had the convention in place.

[0] https://github.com/composer/packagist/issues/163#issuecommen...

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#62

Post by subarctic »

It's only mentioned off hand in one sentence at the end, but have people found that Rust is hard to hire for? In my experience it's relatively easy to filter for good candidates when you're hiring for Rust, whereas, just as a point of contrast, I've noticed it's more difficult to find frontend developers who are good at TypeScript (since a lot of frontend developers just use plain JavaScript).

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#63

Post by ModernMech »

adastra22 wrote: post #40
tantalor wrote: post #19

> 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++…

I think they meant Rust? Rust definitely has that property to an extent; C++ is so far from it it’s not even funny.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#65

Post by swatcoder »

jrockway wrote: post #5
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…

URLs for packages makes a lot of sense. It works well in the land of Go. It also conveniently eliminates the need for the language to have a global packages database. Upload your package to example.com/your-thing and it's released! (You can, of course, still offer a cache and search engine if you want to.)

No, URL's don't make sense because your application shouldn't care where on the internet your dependency happened to be hosted when you integrated it. It's location has nothing to do with what it is.

By the time you're going to production, your vetted and locked dependency should be living in your own cache/mirror/vendored-repo/whatever so that you know exactly what code you built your project around and know exactly what the availability will be when you build/instantiate your project.

Your project shouldn't need to care whether GitHub fell out of fashion and the project moved to GitLab, and definitely shouldn't be relying on GitHub being available when you need to build, test, deploy, or scale. That's a completely unnecessary failure point for you to introduce.

Systems that use URL-identified packages can work around some of this, but just reinforce terrible habits.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#66

Post by estebank »

jrockway wrote: post #5
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…

URLs for packages makes a lot of sense. It works well in the land of Go. It also conveniently eliminates the need for the language to have a global packages database. Upload your package to example.com/your-thing and it's released! (You can, of course, still offer a cache and search engine if you want to.)

It doesn't help with the failure mode of dependencies disappearing, which forces people that care about it to vendor, which in turn brings its own set of issues.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#67

Post by ModernMech »

alpaca128 wrote: post #23
throwaway914 wrote: post #7

I 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…

> We should never be explicitly iterating forward over a collection unless we need this behavior for the algorithm. Things should be implicitly parallel There is already a crate providing parallel iterators. You just rename the iter() call and that's it. I don't agree it should be implicit though.

It’s called Rayon for anyone who wants to know.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#68

Post by willsmith72 »

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.

if it were that simple, I'd take the "billing time" payment every time. Engineers' time is the greatest cost for just about any tech business

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#69

Post by Kenji »

bogwog wrote: post #53

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 option…

[dead]

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#70

Post by pcwalton »

jiggawatts wrote: post #24
lolinder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, and all of those have had major security issues caused by their lack of foresight. "We're pretending security is not an issue." has been the feedback every time this is raised with the Cargo team. To be honest, it's turned me off Rust a little bit. The attitude of "Rust is memory-safe, so we don't need any other form of security." is not a good one.

> "We're pretending security is not an issue." has been the feedback every time this is raised with the Cargo team.

Literally nobody has said this.

> The attitude of "Rust is memory-safe, so we don't need any other form of security." is not a good one.

Fortunately it's an attitude that nobody in the Rust project has!

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