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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#381

Post by cratermoon »

Animats wrote: post #378

Some days I have misgivings, but not about the language. About the crate situation. Too many important low-level crates stuck at 0.x. I've previously written about problems with the high-performance 3D graphics libraries, but only game devs care about those. At the language level, the big problem is back references. Sometimes you do need them, and the only safe way to do them at present involves reference counts in t…

> Too many important low-level crates stuck at 0.x.

Is it fair to say that Rust failed to supply a robust set of standard libraries comparable to other modern languages? Or was the language aimed at level geared towards implementing rather than providing libraries? If it's truly a systems language, then what library features are essential, and what are 'nice to have'?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#382

Post by dingi »

Biggest turn off for me was Rust's horrendous syntax. Dangling apostrophes, wrapping the hell out of things, etc. Just look at this Result, Arc>. Absolutely horrendous.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#384

Post by Kiro »

> Refactoring can be a slog

This made me not want to try Rust. I was coding vanilla JavaScript for a very long time before trying TypeScript but when I did I was amazed at how much easier refactoring became. That alone made me very excited about type systems and I instantly started looking at Rust, thinking it would be even better. Apparently not. Maybe the sweet spot (for me) is TypeScript.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#385

Post by maccam94 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #360
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've finally set my mind to properly learning a new language after Python, Haskell, and typescript. I'm looking into Rust especially because of how I've heard it interoperates with Python (and also because it's maybe being used in the Linux kernel? Is that correct?).

Linux kernel has support for rust userland drivers, and rust interops with python with pyo3.

Not sure what you mean by "userland" drivers here, but support for kernel modules written in rust is actively being developed. It's already being used for kernel drivers like the Asahi Linux GPU driver for M1 Macs.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#386

Post by SkiFire13 »

solomonb wrote: post #337
mjevans wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An abstract syntax tree can't have cycles by definition.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#387

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #340
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).

[deleted]

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#388

Post by pjmlp »

tkubacki wrote: post #366
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is underrated by the HN crowd, I find. I quite like how mid sized firms (100-1000 employees) use it.

I used to be .NET dev and don't agree. Couple of reaons: 1) Modern Java is almost as good as C# with some things I can't give up in Java (static imports => succint code, Groovy Spock => succint tests) 2) Kotlin is better than C# 3) JVM has much much bigger ecosystem (almost all the apache projects are JVM oriented) and default web framework is much less code to type (SpringBoot) is much more productiv 4) JVM has wide…

Kind of, maybe you need to do some low level coding and don't want to wait for Valhala, or make use of JNI and native libraries, GraalVM/OpenJ9 still aren't as integrated as .NET Native or Native AOT, e.g. writing native shared libraries.

Also Java lost the attention span of the gaming industry, besides Android casual games and Minecraft, there are hardly anyone else paying attention to it.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#390

Post by pncnmnp »

mtsr wrote: post #367
goku12 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just wish Rust learning resources would be more upfront about this. While beginner resources don't dwell too much upon cyclic references, they don't consider unsafe blocks as unusual. All the material I've seen say that there are certain domains where Rust's compile-time safety model simply won't work. What Rust allows you to do instead, is to limit the scope of unsafe blocks. However, the beginner material often…

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak. Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust. A good reference for different approaches is Learn…

Also, take a look at GhostCell (https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ghostcell/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIbubw86p0M). If anyone's used this in a project or production environment, I'd love to hear your firsthand experiences and insights.
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