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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#411

Post by satvikpendem »

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 like that there are no namespaces, it forces people to come up with unique names rather than naming their calendar crate to be `calendar`.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#412

Post by rcxdude »

rat87 wrote: post #345
lucideer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The implication here is that namespaces in package managers weren't a known concept. Outside Java, NPM - probably the biggest at the time - not only supported them but was actively encouraging them due to collective regret around going single-global in the beginning. Co…

What are the benefits?

mainly, you can trust that anything under the foo/ namespace is controlled by only a smaller group of people, as opposed to the current situation on cargo where people pseudo-namespace by making a bunch of packages called foo-bar, foo-baz, and you can't trust that foo-bin wasn't just inserted by someone else attempting to appear to be part of the foo project. It also helps substantially with naming collisions, especially squatting.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#413

Post by yagni_dev »

galangalalgol wrote: post #283
AlotOfReading wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're remotely sane, you'll always want memory safety. That's not really an optional property, because even in C/C++ compromising memory safety throws you straight into the land of nasal demons. The question is whether you want the compiler to ensure memory safety, or to do it completely on your own without language support. Personally, I've never met anyone who can ensure memory safety in their C/C++ without one…

And saying c++ has more mature tooling seems insane too. Anyone who has had to mess with depedency trees using git submodules and cmake, conan, bazel, vcpkg, and meson would not call the tooling, oh and hunter too!, mature.

You have no idea what tooling means in this context!

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#414

Post by muixoozie »

Kiro wrote: post #384

> 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.

For what it's worth, I find refactoring in Rust a joy.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#415

Post by CGamesPlay »

estebank wrote: post #253
CGamesPlay wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The compiler is trying to help out as much as possible, especially since rustc has the best error messages in the world. Generally good, but man do I hate how any error in my async function causes every recursive call site to generate an error about how the Future is no longer Send and Sync. Literally an entire console scrollback of errors with the actual syntax error buried somewhere in the middle.

I believe this is in our radar and waiting on the new trait solver, but just in case if you have a repro I would appreciate a ticket to improve the diagnostic.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

In this case, the first two errors are clear. The next 3 provide multiple, redundant context blocks. The upshot is that this simple example results in rustc printing 11 lines of useful error messages and 86 lines of useless messages. Add to that the fact that the useful error messages need not be at the top or bottom of the error list, they can be anywhere inside of it, depending on the declaration order.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#416

Post by goku12 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #359
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…

Surprisingly, I am faster in Rust than any other language. Something about my prior experiences just made it click just the right way. I don't want to program in anything else anymore. I don't want to deal with obscure C++ error messages, C footguns and lack of ergonomics, I don't want to deal with abstraction hell of Java, or the poor person's typing that python has. I have been programming in Python for the past 6…

> Surprisingly, I am faster in Rust than any other language.

Not really surprising, given that you have C and C++ background. That's what I was trying to highlight. Rust isn't a confusing or unproductive language as many project it to be - if you have the conceptual understanding of what happens on the hardware. Especially about stack frames and RAII. If you know those, the borrow checker complaints will immediately make sense and you will know how to resolve them.

Add rust-analyzer (Rust's language server) to it, you get real-time type annotations and a way to match types correctly in the first attempt. In my experience Rust also helps structure your program correctly and saves a ton of time in debugging. All in all, Rust is a fast way to write correct programs.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#417

Post by littlestymaar »

GuestHNUser wrote: post #396
csomar wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what seamlessly means, Rust can also interop with C libraries. I wrapped a bunch of them.

Truly seamless because the zig compiler is also a C compiler, so the type information and calling convention works across languages at a level above any other I've encountered.

True, but I think that the person you're responding argued that rust/C integration is also seamless. (In the general discussion I'd say they're right as C to Rust integration isn't much of an problem and you can use C libraries relatively easily in Rust as well, but at the same time when talking about Zig I don't think it's fair to put it on the same ground).

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#418

Post by GuestHNUser »

JohnFen wrote: post #292
HKH2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what do you dislike about it?

Good question! There's no single thing, I think, and the things I dislike about it aren't even really technical criticism or the like. They're more... aesthetic? I find the syntax unpleasant, for instance. It's extremely opinionated and a few of those opinions are ones I disagree with. Also, just generally, it tends to make even simple things pretty complex. I understand why and am not really objecting to that, but i…

I share your sentiment about Rust. Fine language for sure, I just don't enjoy programming in it. Simply put, I don't like using the abstractions that the language encourages.

For what it is worth, I found pursuing Zig to be a breath of fresh air. It's a promising alternative in the same space as C (and also Cpp and Rust). Checkout Andrew Kelley's introduction to the language.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#419

Post by leeman2016 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #355
pjmlp wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scenari…

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

C# is a lovely language to work with.

The only issue I have is with the .NET ... that is, building self-contained binaries to distribute.

For comparison:

* Hello World win-x64 binary self-contained in .NET 7 is around 70 MB

* The same for Go results in 1.2 MB

Edit: Missed 'trimming' in .NET, which would result in a binary of size around 11 MB in win-x64

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#420

Post by Ygg2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #388
tkubacki wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, C# is ok for game dev, but not great. C# libraries are lagging heavily behind Java.

Want a fastest possible library? It's in C++, and not portable to Win/Mac. So good luck with wrap + porting it.

Want a decent implementation of an algo? It usually exists for Java but not for C#. Hope you like writing it from scratch.

Want a C# implementation of an algo that doesn't allocate to the Nth degree. Again, write it yourself.

But ok, maybe Unity has a good ecosystem... And they fucked it over a barrel.

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