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Was Rust Worth It?

jsoverson.medium.com

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#331

Post by throwaway914 »

j-pb wrote: post #42
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…

As someone who does a lot of unsafe rust, including tagged pointer foo, I strongly disagree. If anything I want more explicit control, alleviated with an even more expressive type system. Ideally rusts type system would just be a prolog variant imho.

Anyone that can reliably and off-the-cuff do all of these can have complete control back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Compiler_optimization...

Otherwise we should trust compilers to know better.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#332

Post by mjevans »

lumost wrote: post #316
goku12 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the ergonomic is really bad. Every time I write some rust I feel limited. > But I do not think it is a good general purpose language. Remember that this is not a sentiment that's shared by everyone. I use Rust for tasks that need anything more complicated than a shell script. Even my window manager is controlled from a Rust program. I say this as someone who has been programming in Python for nearly two decades…

I tried to get into rust for many years, I'm now in a C/CPP job (after Java/Python/Ruby and other gigs). What I've come to understand is that Rust's lifetime model is very difficult to work with whenever you have a cyclic reference. In C/CPP the same holds, but you deal with it through clever coding - or ignoring the problem and cleaning up memory later. Java, and other GC'd languages just work for these structures.…

What's a frequently encountered case for such cyclic loops? Without details I'm drawn to trying to break the cycle, either by promoting the shared state to a container object for the set, or by breaking it out into it's own object that multiple things can point at.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#333

Post by lifthrasiir »

kuon wrote: post #231

I wrote a lot of rust, but after some years it still feels unproductive. I do a lot of zig now and I am like 10 times more productive with it. I can just concentrate on what I want to code and I never have to wonder what tool or what library to use. I know rust gives memory safety and how important that is, but the ergonomic is really bad. Every time I write some rust I feel limited. I always have to search libraries…

Since you have previously said that you are using Zig to do embedded programming for medical devices, I assume that it is your main pain point. I largely agree that the current Rust embedded story is not exactly for existing embedded programmers (and I guess you are one of them). Rather it looks more like a solution for existing application programmers. I don't think it's an intrinsic limitation of Rust the programming language, rather a specific community at this point happens to prefer this way. Still it is a weakness in some sense and Zig will be a good alternative.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#334

Post by brundolf »

The clippy bit is a little confusing:

> It also looks like (soon) you’ll finally be able to configure global lints for a project. Until now, you had to hack your solution to keep lints consistent for projects. In Wick, we use a script to automatically update inline lint configurations for a few dozen crates.

It's trivial to configure global lints per crate. The author's problem comes down to having multiple crates per project. Which is something people do sometimes, and should be supported, but there's a big difference between the two interpretations. I would go so far as to say most Rust projects are only one crate (and so support "global" linter configuration)

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#335

Post by conradev »

kuon wrote: post #231

I wrote a lot of rust, but after some years it still feels unproductive. I do a lot of zig now and I am like 10 times more productive with it. I can just concentrate on what I want to code and I never have to wonder what tool or what library to use. I know rust gives memory safety and how important that is, but the ergonomic is really bad. Every time I write some rust I feel limited. I always have to search libraries…

I agree with this general feeling, and it is hard to articulate

Rust forces you to figure out ahead of time where each bit or byte is going to go and on which thread and using which mutation scheme. I’m happy to play the game, but it feels tedious for anything short of a parser or a microcontroller.

It messes with my process because I like to get something working before I determine the best API structure for it

I can get 90% of the performance with Swift and it flows much more easily, even though Rust’s type system is more powerful.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#336

Post by dingi »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #284
symlinkk wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s so hard about “npm install” and “package.json”. It’s dead simple

No you see Java devs have stockholm-syndromed themselves into believe that a giant stack of XML, or some unhinged mini-language are actually good, and much better than something the humans involved can actually read and parse easily and now to compensate with other ecosystems providing 85% of the functionality, with 5% of the pain, they’ve got to find some reason to complain about them.

what's wrong with XML? Maven XML is a configuration not a programming language.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#337

Post by solomonb »

mjevans wrote: post #332
lumost wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to get into rust for many years, I'm now in a C/CPP job (after Java/Python/Ruby and other gigs). What I've come to understand is that Rust's lifetime model is very difficult to work with whenever you have a cyclic reference. In C/CPP the same holds, but you deal with it through clever coding - or ignoring the problem and cleaning up memory later. Java, and other GC'd languages just work for these structures.…

What's a frequently encountered case for such cyclic loops? Without details I'm drawn to trying to break the cycle, either by promoting the shared state to a container object for the set, or by breaking it out into it's own object that multiple things can point at.

ASTs

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#338

Post by pjmlp »

kuon wrote: post #231

I wrote a lot of rust, but after some years it still feels unproductive. I do a lot of zig now and I am like 10 times more productive with it. I can just concentrate on what I want to code and I never have to wonder what tool or what library to use. I know rust gives memory safety and how important that is, but the ergonomic is really bad. Every time I write some rust I feel limited. I always have to search libraries…

I rather use compiled managed languages like Swift, D and C# instead, they provide enough low level coding knobs for C and C++ style coding, while being high level productive.

Would add Go to the list, but only when I really have to.

Nim and Crystal could be alternatives, but don't seem to have big enough communities, at least for what I do.

However I do agree with the conclusion, Rust is a great language for scenarios where no form of automatic memory management is allowed, kernels, specific kinds of drivers, GPGPU programming, as general purpose, there are more productive alternatives, equally safe.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#339

Post by ReactiveJelly »

corytheboyd wrote: post #216
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…

I don’t work with rust on the regular, but this is so annoying with package repositories in general. No don’t use http-server, it’s bad, instead you have to use MuffinTop, it’s better. And then you just have to know that. The concept of sanctioned package names would be interesting, but probably chaotic in practice as the underlying code behind this sort of alias changes over time. This will remain a part of being a…

(You probably agree with me but I'm going to just write one big comment instead of replying to every slightly incorrect comment in the thread)

Naming things really is one of the hardest problems. This crates thing is a special case of Zooko's Triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

Crates.io names are human-meaningful and everyone sees the same names, but it's vulnerable to squatting, spamming, and Sybil attacks.

You could tie a name to a public key, like onion addresses do, but it's unwieldy for humans. (NB, nothing stops you from doing this inside of crates.io if you really wanted)

You could use pet names where "http-server" and "http-client" locally map to "hyper" and "reqwest", but nobody likes those, because they don't solve the bootstrap problem.

It's a problem with all repos because when you say "http-server should simply be the best server that everyone likes right now", you have to decide who is the authority of "best", and "everyone", and "now". Don't forget how much useless crap is left in the Python stdlib marked as "don't use this as of 2018, use the 3rd-party lib that does it way better."

So yeah... probably will be a problem forever. As a bit of fun here are some un-intuitive names, and my proposed improvements:

- Rename Apache to "http-server"

- Rename Nginx to "http-server-2"

- Rename Caddy to "http-server-2-golang"

- Rename libcurl to "http-client"

- Rename GTK+ to "linux-gui"

- Rename Qt to "linux-gui-2"

- Rename xfce4 to "linux-desktop-3"

Then you only need to remember which numbers are good and which numbers are bad! Like how IPv4 is the best, IPv6 is okay, but IPV5 isn't real, and HTTP 1.1 and 3 are great but 2 kinda sucked.

Very simple. If a company as big as Apple can have simple names like "WebKit", "CoreGraphics", and "CoreAudio" then surely a million hackers competing in a free marketplace can do the same thing.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#340

Post by csomar »

kuon wrote: post #231

I wrote a lot of rust, but after some years it still feels unproductive. I do a lot of zig now and I am like 10 times more productive with it. I can just concentrate on what I want to code and I never have to wonder what tool or what library to use. I know rust gives memory safety and how important that is, but the ergonomic is really bad. Every time I write some rust I feel limited. I always have to search libraries…

Wait, I am a bit confused. Does Zig have more/better libraries than Rust? I thought it's a pretty new language. The most limiting thing for me with Rust was the lack of libraries (vs. say Python or Node/JavaScript).
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