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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#491

Post by kuon »

ostenning wrote: post #364
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…

Opposite experience for me. Writing Rust on embedded systems greatly improved my confidence and speed. When using C a small mistake often leads to undefined behaviour and headaches. Rust theres none of that - its been a game changer for me.

I was using rust on embedded, I moved to zig. Very happy with it as you can pass allocators around to use fixed buffer.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#492

Post by starlevel003 »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #432
beautron wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Later comes along Go. No dependency management at the start. There ended up being two ways of specifying dependencies. At least one included putting github.io/username/package into your code. That username changes and all your code has to change. Awful design. "github.io/username/package" is using a domain name, just like Java. Changing the username part is like changing the domain name--I don't see how this is any…

Note that in Java it is merely a convention to use domain names as packages. There is no technical requirement to do so. So moving to a different domain has no impact whatsoever on dependency resolution. Many people use non-existent domain names. To be honest I really like how Java advocated for verbose namespaces. Library authors have this awful idea that their library is a special little snowflake that deserves the…

It may be a convention but in practice if you want to publish your package to Maven Central you need to prove ownership of your group ID domain. (Or ownership of your SCM account, which is in essence another domain).

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#493

Post by kuon »

anon-3988 wrote: post #296
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 am curious what kind of code you are writing? Is it very low level or very high? >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 and how to do things. I cannot just "type the code". You don't have to search libraries and figure out how to do things in Zig?

Most of the time I can use my "general computer science baggage" to write the solution. At present, I do embedded and web business logic (wasm) where the UI is rendered by preact. For those two projects zig is working very well.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#494

Post by kuon »

littlestymaar wrote: post #380
csomar wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It doesn't. The ecosystem is very immature and even the official tooling is very unstable. It has a bunch of interesting design ideas but at this point it's more of an experimental language than a production ready one by most metrics. (And unless it finds some kind of corporate backing, this is unlikely to ever change).

We shipped a few web apps backed by zig. It is absolutely in production.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#495

Post by kuon »

nlnn wrote: post #427
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 use Rust a lot, and have been really keen on getting into Zig. Not sure if much has changed (it was a while back), but my biggest problem was with finding and using 3rd party libraries (mostly for the boring stuff like DB connectivity, JSON/YAML parsing, logging, etc.). E.g. even now if I search for "zig mysql library", the tops hits are all about people discussing it on reddit, than any actual library.

You cImport the C library most of the time.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#496

Post by andreashaerter »

andrewstuart wrote: post #241
overgard wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to shame you, but how long have you been coding? I've not yet had the urge to ask an AI for coding help, ever. The questions that are decoupled enough from a field/project that it might be able to answer seem trivial and easy just to search on. Plus, I'm way more trusting of a Stack Overflow post or even a blog post than what AI generates. I mean, AI hallucinates all the time or generates things that a…

I'm not trying to shame you, but how long have you been coding? You're not using the tools available to make you a better and more productive programmer? If you're not using AI as part of your daily workflow you are burning time and money and not maximising your potential. If I was your team lead I'd give you a warning, same as I would if you didn't use an IDE or source control. Being ignorant of programming producti…

How do you deal with NDAs and privacy issues? Do you not work on any code which is not OK to share with Microsoft?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#497

Post by skdotdan »

Rust is great, but one thing I’d like to see is an interpreted, dynamic, less strict version of it that could be used for prototyping and gradually typed into compiling Rust code. In other words, a new programming language doing to Rust the reverse of what Mojo is trying to do to Python.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#498

Post by kuon »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #333
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 programmi…

Yes, I think rust is very good for higher level programmers wanting to code embedded like a regular OS. There are many great projects around using rust on embedded.

But me, I prefer to manipulate registers directly. Especially with "exotic" MCU where you have to execute write/read in specific number of CPU cycles. Rust makes that very hard.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#499

Post by Alifatisk »

dilippkumar wrote: post #84

> After two decades of JavaScript and decent experience with Go, this is the most significant source of frustration and friction with Rust. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but you must always be ready to deal with the async monster when it rears its head. In other languages, async is almost invisible. I am a former C and C++ programmer who lived calling into pthread almost every week for a decade. I use async rus…

> In my opinion, everyone should be using async for everything. Including stuff that’s seemingly single threaded “simple” stuff.

I learned the opposite, that programmers tend to make everything unnecessarly async when it's not needed causing more complexity and mental load.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#500

Post by avgcorrection »

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.

No it isn’t Both languages comprise much more than their memory management handling. Even if your premise is true, the conclusion does not follow.

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