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I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

gavinhoward.com

51–60 of 195 posts

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#51

Projects adopting rust makes contributing less fun and more painful I tried to work on bug fix for Zed, waiting 30 seconds everytime you change a value was _very_ painful

There’s no reason you couldn’t have a rust jit for development then compile the code for production (or stick with a jit for prod too).

There's no reason? Are you sure about this?

I think you mean there could theoretically be an interpreted Rust, but I don't think anyone has ever made a prototype of a Rust interpreter.

The closest is probably rust-analyzer (the official language server), that maintains internal state and reacts to changes you make, but it doesn't create an executable artifact.

The other is probably the Cranelift Backend (https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift), which can produce debug builds quickly.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#52

Maybe that will sound banal to some but C would be so much more enjoyable to me if it had a "cargo" system and no implicit imports.

That's why i like zig it has at least the very basic with build.zig for build script. You have build.zig.zon for build.zig dependencies.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#53

My personal take on this subject is that Rust turns experts back into beginners and some devs react with hatred because of the fear this induces. For me it was the opposite. I was getting bored with my industry and thinking of a move to something else like management. Rust came along 6 yeas ago (for me) and threw me a lifeline. I love getting good at something that is hard, it’s just very satisfying. I do get why som…

> My personal take on this subject is that Rust turns experts back into beginners and some devs react with hatred because of the fear this induces.

Those people are probably poor devs. Anyone who doesn't have the attitude and mindset to continue learning in something like software development which keeps advancing isn't cut out for that field.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#54
post #36

I'll bite: What specific parts of rust syntax do people find so ugly? I keep hearing this from decent chunks of people who don't write rust, but the language doesn't seem that far off C to me. It's certainly no haskell.

>I keep hearing this from decent chunks of people who don't write rust

That's exactly the people you want to hear from if you're trying to improve adoption.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#55
post #38

The author makes the best argument for Rust in the linked post[0] Rust is great for teams because it removes many things that make working on team code dangerous. The items mentioned above are some. I work alone, however, because I like to keep my code in my head and working with people means parts of the code are only in their head. This also means that the bigger the language is, the less space I have in my head fo…

"Most code is written in teams and even software with a single author needs a plan for when the maintainer steps down."

I strongly disagree! My experience is this:

1. Sole developer builds useful thing

2. Team takes over maintenance

3. Feature bloat, sluggishness, bugs ignored, Agile initiative, "Product owners"

4. Company goes bankrupt or gets acquired

I don't think you can have the clarity of vision that a single person will produce if you're working on it with a big team. That's why so many useful things start with a single person or a very small team, like Linux, Android, curl, ffmpeg, Quake engine, the 2 ppl Firefox "Phoenix" team, the original 3 ppl JetBrains team, the 2 original Photoshop devs.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#57
post #36

I'll bite: What specific parts of rust syntax do people find so ugly? I keep hearing this from decent chunks of people who don't write rust, but the language doesn't seem that far off C to me. It's certainly no haskell.

The more interesting follow up question is: "How would you express the same semantics with a different syntax?" Too often discussions about Rust's ugly syntax lack this crucial component.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#58
post #36

I'll bite: What specific parts of rust syntax do people find so ugly? I keep hearing this from decent chunks of people who don't write rust, but the language doesn't seem that far off C to me. It's certainly no haskell.

From what I've asked people, the complaints fall mainly into two categories:

* familiarity and aesthetics. Rust uses fewer round () parens, and more and {}. This makes it look alien, and people say it's unreadable when they don't immediately recognize the language constructs they know.

* misattributing difficulty of learning Rust concepts like lifetimes and generics to their syntax. People say they want less syntax, but they mean they don't want to explicitly specify things like ownership and trait bounds.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#59
post #7

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself: - Backends: Gleam or other BEAM - Web frontend: Gleam - Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter - Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin - Blazing fast: Zig - Blazing fast and safest: Rust - Fast performance and iteration: Go Would love to hear additions and corrections. My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I…

- Backends: Kotlin (on JVM)

- Web frontend: TypeScript (maybe Gleam in the future!?)

- Fast performance and iteration if I want a binary: Kotlin (native compiled)

- Blazingly fast and good for WASM: Rust

- languages that I keep an eye on: Gleam, Zig, Odin

- languages that I will never touch: C, C++

- languages that I think are quaint: OCamel, Lisp, Haskel

- languages that I have used in the past and that are fine: Dart

- languages that I have used in the past and that are ok: Java (if it had nullability, it'd be fine)

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#60
post #36

I'll bite: What specific parts of rust syntax do people find so ugly? I keep hearing this from decent chunks of people who don't write rust, but the language doesn't seem that far off C to me. It's certainly no haskell.

> What specific parts of rust syntax do people find so ugly? ... the language doesn't seem that far off C to me. It's certainly no haskell.

Make that "not far off C++" (C is really beautiful in comparison), and there's your answer.

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