Easy Mode Rust
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Easy Mode Rust
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Re: Easy Mode Rust
#2Cool cheatsheet. As someone new to Rust, what are the benefits versus Go, C++, and C?
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#3[deleted]
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#4Cool cheatsheet. As someone new to Rust, what are the benefits versus Go, C++, and C?
Rust can:
- Do the things C and C++ can do.
- Without the memory corruption issues those languages are infamous for.
- With the conveniences you'd expect of any post-internet language. (A library ecosystem that's unified around a standard build system and package manager, an async IO story, UTF-8 strings, etc.)
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#5Cool cheatsheet. As someone new to Rust, what are the benefits versus Go, C++, and C?
Sibling doesn't really cover the benefits vs. Go, so here's my attempt at a list.
* Rust offers memory safety without a GC. You may or may not want a GC. If you don't, then Rust is the better option.
* More broadly, Rust has a C++-like focus on providing zero cost abstractions. Go is generally happy to accept a small runtime cost for abstraction.
* Rust can generate small WASM targets because it doesn't need to bundle a runtime. Go can target WASM too, but you either need to accept much larger object sizes or use TinyGo, which doesn't implement all Go language features (although it's pretty close now that generics support has arrived).
* Rust code generally runs faster (although a lot depends on whether you're writing the kind of code where a GC is a net positive or a net negative for performance).
* Rust has a fancier type system that's much more able to express invariants. If your happy place is a place where the type system proves that your code is correct, then Rust will make you much happier than Go. The Go type system (and the culture around Go more generally) tends not to favor elaborate abstractions built on types.
* Rust has fully-featured macros, if that's your bag.
I think there are also some disadvantages of Rust compared to Go, but I've only attempted to list the advantages here.
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#6[dead]
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#7Cool cheatsheet. As someone new to Rust, what are the benefits versus Go, C++, and C?
Rust can: - Do the things C and C++ can do. - Without the memory corruption issues those languages are infamous for. - With the conveniences you'd expect of any post-internet language. (A library ecosystem that's unified around a standard build system and package manager, an async IO story, UTF-8 strings, etc.)
Annoyingly said library ecosystem with the standard build system and package manager becomes a pain to deal with when you're trying to do something like add packages made in the language to distros, requiring a bunch of hacks to do things like just have Cargo not try to reach online to get all the dependencies. Also stuff like the way feature flags are used cause a combinatorial explosion of packages just so you can have every single variant packaged, because it's the only way to be sure that software can be reliably compiled.
I feel that this could have been provided even without having Cargo and crates repeat the mistakes of both Maven and NPM.
At least the async IO is nice enough even if it does rely on a bunch of sometimes uncontrollable heap allocation. I'd prefer CSP personally, but it could be worse. Although with that you also couldn't avoid allocations.
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust can: - Do the things C and C++ can do. - Without the memory corruption issues those languages are infamous for. - With the conveniences you'd expect of any post-internet language. (A library ecosystem that's unified around a standard build system and package manager, an async IO story, UTF-8 strings, etc.)
Annoyingly said library ecosystem with the standard build system and package manager becomes a pain to deal with when you're trying to do something like add packages made in the language to distros, requiring a bunch of hacks to do things like just have Cargo not try to reach online to get all the dependencies. Also stuff like the way feature flags are used cause a combinatorial explosion of packages just so you can…
How do the distro packages work? Are they trying to provide dependencies as pre-built binaries? I didn't know Cargo could consume binaries like that.
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Annoyingly said library ecosystem with the standard build system and package manager becomes a pain to deal with when you're trying to do something like add packages made in the language to distros, requiring a bunch of hacks to do things like just have Cargo not try to reach online to get all the dependencies. Also stuff like the way feature flags are used cause a combinatorial explosion of packages just so you can…
How do the distro packages work? Are they trying to provide dependencies as pre-built binaries? I didn't know Cargo could consume binaries like that.
I can't speak for other distros, but at least in Fedora what happens is that library code is distributed in various devel packages, where the base package for, say, "futures-io" contains the actual code. So that's the "rust-futures-io-devel.noarch". After this, you get various "subpackages" for each feature. These are mostly there so that you can declare in a package that you need certain features, these packages are fully virtual, it seems, even though they all claim ownership of the relevant Cargo.toml in the local registry.
So to be fair, I was incorrect about it being a combinatorial explosion, since I was under the impression that each combination of features would be a package, but this makes a lot more sense. It's still a quite foreign way of packaging software, though. Although I'm glad that at least Cargo can be operated offline and from official repos.
Re: Easy Mode Rust
#10Recording of the Rust Nation UK talk mentioned in the article: