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I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

gavinhoward.com

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Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#61

Post by ajross »

ceronman wrote: post #32

The author seems very anxious because Rust is getting traction and they don't like Rust. They're afraid that one day Rust will become a "monoculture" and everything will be written in it. I like Rust, but I consider this very, very unlikely. Rust has actually brought more choice to the programming language scenario. If we're talking about monoculture, let's talk about C/C++. For decades this was the only viable optio…

FWIW it was LLVM that catalyzed the modern florescence of programming language innovation. Rust is just another result of that shift, not its cause.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#62

Post by [deleted] »

oDot wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#63

Post by K0nserv »

fxtentacle wrote: post #55
K0nserv wrote: 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 p…

> That's why so many useful things start with a single person or *a very small team*,

You subtly shifted the goal posts here. But even if you start out with a single person you eventually have to have new maintainers, if only because of human mortality. Software is a young field so we haven't had to contend much with this fact yet, but it's inevitable.

Personally I think something like Rust is helpful for large solo programs too, keeping everything in your head past 10kCLOC is hard so why not have a language and compiler that helps you?

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#64

Post by Timshel »

dgb23 wrote: post #28

The post is a bit of a rant and all over the place. Async infecting everything, ugly syntax (who cares?), slow compile times etc. What stood out to me: > In other words, if compilation is fast, the tooling is easy. Andrew Kelley said something similar in a recent talk. Compiler performance seems to be the number one priority at the moment for Zig. The rationale seems to be: fast compilation leads to more productivity…

Fast compilation is nice and I believe stuff like incremental compilation are essential.

But at the end of the day I'll prefer slower compilation every time if it means advanced checking.

And speaking of the zone I prefer writing Scala code for like 1h while fixing compiler errors and then you run and it just works TM vs Java where you'll waste your time tracking NPE ...

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#65

Post by JodieBenitez »

dgb23 wrote: post #28

The post is a bit of a rant and all over the place. Async infecting everything, ugly syntax (who cares?), slow compile times etc. What stood out to me: > In other words, if compilation is fast, the tooling is easy. Andrew Kelley said something similar in a recent talk. Compiler performance seems to be the number one priority at the moment for Zig. The rationale seems to be: fast compilation leads to more productivity…

> ugly syntax (who cares?)

I'm a nobody of course, but I do. Ugly is subjective, and by "ugly" a lot of people probably think "alien", as not what they are used to. Less syntax cruft is good for cognitive load and more common syntax is good for adoption.

But I'm sure the problem fades away with practice.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#66

Post by weinzierl »

> First, the syntax. It’s ugly. TO MY EYES!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you can't please everyone and you should not exceed your weirdness budget[1]. The decision to please the C++ crowd so much (mainly manifested in later syntax related decisions) would not have been my preference, but it makes sense and there could have been worse decisions.

> Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth

I feel a lot of this async criticism has more to do with how async is used than with Rust itself. Maybe it would be good to have more crates that don't used async or even depend on tokio, but in the end this is on us as a community.

> Sixth, Rust doesn’t go far enough in static analysis. Rust had a chance to go much further, and the team blew it.

I am not qualified to judge that, but I am curious of other opinions.

> Seventh, Rust compile times are a joke

True, but this is actively tackled on multiple fronts. One is cranelift, which I find highly fascinating.

[1] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#67

Post by mmaniac »

A lot of this author's complaints about Rust remind me of similar historical complaints about C++, but amplified.

Hijacking and overtaking new projects? C++ and Rust both do that. C++'s compile times were a joke, Rust is even worse. Complex semantics and syntax? Both have those. Rust is trying to be everything to everyone? C++ has always been criticised as design by committee.

And yet C still exists and is widely used. Once the smoke cleared, people simply hated C++ and what it brought. After all was said and done, C became regarded as much more tolerable and usable for lack of those headaches. C++ still exists and there is certainly not a C++ monoculture. I hope and expect that the same story will play out for Rust.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#68

Post by rob74 »

zkldi wrote: 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 think it's not that much the specific parts as it is the combination of (sometimes obscure) symbols forming dense blocks of sigils that you have to carefully pick apart to understand what the code is doing. It's easier to reason about code if it uses words instead of symbols, and Rust seems to desperately want to avoid using actual words (I don't count "fn" as a word, and "pub" is a word, but for me it's somewhere where you go to have a drink after work). Ok, I know there is a long tradition of doing this in C-family languages, but Rust has driven it to new heights, and it has a lot more concepts (with their attached symbols) that you have to keep in your head.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#69

Post by GuB-42 »

People complaining about Rust... As Bjarne Stroustrup says: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"

This is actually the kind signal I wanted to see. A language everyone likes isn't right. In production, programmers have to follow customer requirements, not the other way around, and customers don't care about your pretty code, they want their things to work, and at some point it is going to get ugly, and people will complain. As time goes on, there will be more and more of that ugly legacy code, and you have to keep it, because people are using it, and people will complain more, and they will blame everything that relates to it: the language, customers, management, previous devs, etc... It is actually a good thing, it means the language is used to do real work, you will never get these complains when all people do with it are toy projects or a few precise, programmer driven programs.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#70

Post by [deleted] »

DEADMINCEDOS wrote: post #53
davidhyde wrote: post #24

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.

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