Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Was Rust Worth It?

jsoverson.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 736 posts

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#441

Post by neonsunset »

leeman2016 wrote: post #422
pjmlp wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually that means you aren't using trimming, .NET speak for dead code removal during linking. Also remember that standard .NET runtime does a little bit more than Go's runtime, so it might happen that even with trimming, for basic applications Go ends up having an upper hand on file size. On the other hand, I have had Go static binaries grow up to 200 MB and being require to use UPX to make it manageable, e.g. trivy…

You're right. But even with trimming I get around 10x the size of the Go binary

    dotnet publish -c release -p:PublishAot=true

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#442

Post by goku12 »

pizza234 wrote: post #436
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…

> At this point, I'm about as fast in Rust as I am in Python. This is factually impossible. For anything larger than (very) small programs, Rust requires an upfront design stage, due to ownership, that it's not required when developing in GC'ed languages. This is not even considering more local complexities, like data structures with cyclical references.

> This is factually impossible.

How do you outright deny something as subjective as my personal experience? Besides, I'm not the only one in this discussion that made the same opinion.

> For anything larger than (very) small programs, Rust requires an upfront design stage, due to ownership, that it's not required when developing in GC'ed languages.

While GC'ed languages allow you to skip a proper initial design stage, it's a stretch to claim that it's not required at all. In my experience using Python, while the initial stages are smooth, such design oversights come back and bite at a later stage - leading to a lot of debugging and refactoring. This is one aspect where Rust saves you time.

> This is not even considering more local complexities, like data structures with cyclical references.

I'm not going to dwell on cyclical references, since there's another thread that addresses it. They point out a way to make it as easy in Rust as it is in GC'ed languages.

Meanwhile, the upfront architecture and data structure design isn't as complicated as you project it. Rust is mostly transparent about those - even compared Python. How well do you understand how Python manages Lists, dictionaries or even objects in general? I often find myself thinking about it a lot when programming in Python. While you need to think upfront about these in Rust, there's actually less cognitive overhead as to what is happening behind the scenes.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#443

Post by raincole »

pizza234 wrote: post #436
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…

> At this point, I'm about as fast in Rust as I am in Python. This is factually impossible. For anything larger than (very) small programs, Rust requires an upfront design stage, due to ownership, that it's not required when developing in GC'ed languages. This is not even considering more local complexities, like data structures with cyclical references.

Of course it's possible. You just need to write Python very slowly :)

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#444

Post by akoboldfrying »

jacobgorm wrote: post #438
littlestymaar wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubly-linked list is something you have almost no reason to ever write. Parent field is something where you have a clear hierarchy (it's not really “cyclic”, so it's the perfect use-case for weak references). When coming from a managed-memory language, this obviously requires some conceptual effort to understand why this is a problem at all and how to deal with it, but when compared to C or C++, the situation is muc…

Also, a parent field is something you should be able to infer, e.g, keep a stack of parents as you traverse down a search tree following the child pointers, instead of storing parent pointers in the tree nodes.

That's assuming you traverse the tree down from the root each time. Often you do, but there are cases where you don't -- e.g., if your goal is to determine the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#445

Post by atemerev »

goku12 wrote: post #258
JohnFen wrote: post #95

I'm learning Rust because it seems clear that it's going to be important professionally. I wish I loved it, I really do. I see the benefits. But, at least so far, it's one of the most unpleasant languages I've used. I keep hoping that as I gain proficiency, I'll stop disliking it, but as I climb higher on the learning curve, I'm not really warming to it. It's fine. It won't be the only language I'll be proficient in…

As a counter example, I love programming in Rust. Fighting the borrow checker ended a long time ago. Even the errors are rare these days, except in cases I trigger them in order to examine the types. Rust compiler also seems to have improved in accepting broader cases that are valid. For me, the key to understanding the borrow checker was understanding the underlying memory model. Rust memory model is the same as tha…

How do you do anything dynamic/cyclic? Like, graphs that need to be updated in runtime?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#446

Post by leeman2016 »

neonsunset wrote: post #440
leeman2016 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is an unfair comparison of apples to oranges by building the binary with the wrong flags. .NET produces smaller binaries than Go with NativeAOT (despite including more features).

Yea, I missed trimming. But still NativeAOT results in 10x the size of the Go binary in Windows (win-x64)

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#447

Post by oneshtein »

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…

By "wrote" you are meaning just coding or coding+debugging? Because other languages are easier to code, but hard to make error free, while Rust is hard to write but much easier to make bug free.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#448

Post by cztomsik »

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…

This. I have exactly the same experience, I can't believe how much I was able to ship with Zig and the code mostly feels like "done".

You can always improve it, but there's no need to. With Rust, I was never happy, even after 5 years, I was still thinking about better abstractions and implementing more traits, making it more generic, etc.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#449

Post by ernst_klim »

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. I feel far more productive in C and C++ than in Rust at that point.

Rust feels like totally missing the sweet spot for me. It's way too pedantic about low level stuff for writing higher level applications, but way too complicated for embedded or writing an OS. In the former case I would rather take a C++, Java, Haskell, OCaml or even Go, and maybe sprinkle some C, and in the latter case C in macroassembly mode is far more suitable.

I still have a feeling that original vision of Graydon Hoare (i.e. OCaml/SML with linear types, GC, stack allocations, green threads and CPS) would be a much better language.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#450

Post by lenkite »

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…

Also with JDK 21 - you can use virtual threads. No need for async/await which IMHO is a design mistake. Java copied Go here instead of C#.
Post reply on HN