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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#121

Post by TylerE »

solardev wrote: post #114
echelon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a secret effort in the Rust community to supplant Crates.io and create an entirely new package ecosystem with proper namespacing, security, and much better community. Not naming names, but I know several people working to put Crates.io out to pasture. There's a level of playing nice with them for the time being (eg. build reproducibility), but it's only KTLO. Crates.io needs to die for Rust to thrive. They're…

Why does something like that need to be secret...? Isn't it in the community's best interest?

Drama avoidance and avoiding bikeshedding seem obvious. Much easier to present a working system than a design that will get nitpicked into irrelevancy.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#122

Post by andiareso »

swatcoder wrote: post #65
jrockway wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn’t that why GOPROXY exists though? Not sure why you would need an internet connection. URLs don’t necessarily equate to the internet. Our internal and external packages are all locally hosted and work regardless of the internet being available.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#123

Post by jeroenhd »

echelon wrote: post #111
fawadasaurus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some analysis on crates.io to find the top name squatters. Then I did some calculations and found that the top name squatter created their crates at a rate of about one ever 30 seconds for a period of a week straight. I send the analysis to the crates.io team and pointed that they have a no-automation policy. They told me that it was not sufficient proof that someone was squatting those names. That's my problem…

There's a secret effort in the Rust community to supplant Crates.io and create an entirely new package ecosystem with proper namespacing, security, and much better community. Not naming names, but I know several people working to put Crates.io out to pasture. There's a level of playing nice with them for the time being (eg. build reproducibility), but it's only KTLO. Crates.io needs to die for Rust to thrive. They're…

Crates.io doesn't need to die necessarily. It needs some competition as a wake-up call.

Once a better alternative is out there, crates.io will either wither and die or improve. If it matches its competition in terms of quality and reliability, everyone is better off. If not, the alternative solution will take over.

I'm eager for this crates.io alternative to land, assuming they don't break too many projects in their improvements.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#124

Post by maxbond »

Sharlin wrote: post #93
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…

A null pointer exception is a bug that breaks business logic. There's no "business logic instead of language stuff" because the language stuff is the foundation that business logic rests on. If you don't test against failure modes, what's even the point in testing?

To close the loop, Rust doesn't include a `null` type and you wouldn't encounter something comparable in idiomatic Rust (because you'd be using eg Option::map to handle None cases gracefully), so this is a class of test that would be common in Java and C that is close to irrelevant in Rust.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#125

Post by tialaramex »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #25

As an outsider, I often hear about async Rust being less than ideal. Perhaps I don't understand, because I haven't dipped my toes in the water yet... but I do most of my work in Kotlin with Coroutines, and concurrency is everywhere in the UI. I can't imagine working in a language having a major deficit in this space. Are there any efforts to overhaul or completely rethink this?

Here's a better explanation by somebody smarter than me about why Rust chooses what it does, what else you could choose and what the price is: https://without.boats/blog/why-async-rust/

tl;dr: You can have different (nicer to program) abstractions, but you can't have them in the same language you use to write firmware for a $10 electronic device, or Linux drivers, and we already have languages like Go and Javascript whereas we did not have a safer alternative to C++.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#126

Post by baby »

WatchDog wrote: post #109
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…

Maven and Java really don’t get enough credit for how well it’s dependency management works. So many inferior dependency management systems for other languages have come along later, and learned nothing from those that came before it.

Is this a joke?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#127

Post by baby »

rochak wrote: post #3
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…

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

How is this a good decision? You have to alias packages when names collide

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#128

Post by RantyDave »

Re: async, rust is a down to the metal language. IE library yes, runtime no. Async implementations are all either runtimes (Javascript), or libraries that implement a runtime (Python). Under the circumstances I think it's fair that rust has less than ideal async.

I still like threads, but the I'm old and uncool.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#129

Post by jrpelkonen »

jackpeterfletch wrote: post #72
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…

> Do you need memory safety? I think that’s an unusual way frame that requirement. All programs need to handle memory _correctly_. Very few seg fault as part of expected operation.

Segfaults are not actually even the worst outcome, corrupting the program state yet still trucking along can lead to far worse consequences.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#130

Post by doubloon »

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…

In my opinion, until you have spent a lot of time debugging C/C++/assembly issues (memory corruption, null pointer crashes, segfaults, build system problems, exception inception, etc), Rust would probably seem like a total waste of time.
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