My negative views on Rust (2023)
chrisdone.com
My negative views on Rust (2023)
1–10 of 308 posts
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#2> People waste time on trivialities that will never make a difference.
Depending on the situation, memory layout could be trivial (copying 200 bytes once at startup vs. not in a way that should never be user-perceptible and difficult to even measure) or actually a big deal (chasing down pointers upon pointers in a tight inner loop). It's entirely situational. To dismiss all of that as "trivial" and saying it will "never" make a difference is not helpful. There are a lot of shitty apps that are impossible to get running reasonably without a total rewrite and their shitty use of memory is part of that.
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#3I've read this before, it's been passed around the Rust community a few times.
The annotated tl;dr is: Chris doesn't want to learn how hardware works, they don't want to learn how to write optimal software, they don't want to write safe software, they just want to write in a language they already know because they're not comfortable with learning other languages because their home language is a functional language (Haskell). It's a weird, yet short, essay that doesn't actually go anywhere.
I suspect Chris wrote the essay against their will, or because people asking them about Rust rubbed them the wrong way, because they lash out and say "This post still offends many who have tied Rust to their identity, but that’s their problem, not mine."
Its the Internet, man, if you're not offending someone, nobody is reading your shit.
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#4Needs (2023)
> I predict that tracing garbage collectors will become popular in Rust eventually.
The use of Rc is already very widespread in projects when people don't want to deal with the borrow checker and only want to use the ML-like features of Rust (Sum types, Option, Error etc.)
> Rust has arrived at the complexity of Haskell and C++, each year requiring more knowledge to keep up with the latest and greatest.
I wonder when we will see the rise of Haskell like LanguageExtensions in Rust. AFAIK, pretty much everybody uses things like GADT, PolyKinds, OverloadedStrings etc. The most similar thing I can think of Rust right now for is python-like decorator application of things like builder macros using Bon.
> Async is highly problematic
Agreed. Tokyo is the only reason, I think, anybody is able to use Rust for this stuff.
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#5> People waste time on trivialities that will never make a difference. Depending on the situation, memory layout could be trivial (copying 200 bytes once at startup vs. not in a way that should never be user-perceptible and difficult to even measure) or actually a big deal (chasing down pointers upon pointers in a tight inner loop). It's entirely situational. To dismiss all of that as "trivial" and saying it will "ne…
Thinking like that is how we get 12MB of javascript to read a news article, or mobile apps that are jankier than Word 97.
I don't get how someone can criticise a systems programming language by saying "I have to think about memory layout"....
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#6> People waste time on trivialities that will never make a difference. Depending on the situation, memory layout could be trivial (copying 200 bytes once at startup vs. not in a way that should never be user-perceptible and difficult to even measure) or actually a big deal (chasing down pointers upon pointers in a tight inner loop). It's entirely situational. To dismiss all of that as "trivial" and saying it will "ne…
Criticising a systems programming language for needing to manually manage memory is honestly embarrassing.
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#7So much to disagree with....
> In practice, people just want to be able to write a tree-like type without having to play Chess against the compiler.
Sure, Rust's strong encouragement of tree-structured ownership may be annoying when you try and make a spaghetti ownership soup, but it's not like it doesn't have upsides. Many people have written about how the ownership & borrowing rules lead to code structure that has fewer bugs.
> I think that if you rewrite anything from scratch with performance in mind, you’ll see a significant performance improvement.
Maybe, but I think this is missing the point. The "rewrote it in Rust and it's X times faster" stories are generally when people rewrite from very slow (Python) or medium fast languages (JavaScript or maybe even Go).
In those cases you can rewrite in Rust without considering performance and get amazing speedups. I recently did a straight 1:1 port of some Python code with zero extra optimisation effort and got a 45x speedup.
Sure I maybe could have got the same in C or C++ but there's no way I would have rewritten it in C++ because fuck segfaults and UB. I don't want to spend any more of my life debugging that.
> Rust has arrived at the complexity of Haskell and C++, each year requiring more knowledge to keep up with the latest and greatest.
I don't really know about Haskell, but I don't think Rust's complexity is anywhere close to as bad as C++'s. Even if it were it doesn't matter because in Rust if you forget some complex rule the compiler will tell you, whereas in C++ it will randomly crash but only in release mode after the program has been running for 2 hours. Totally different.
> The “Friendly” Community
Gotta agree with this though. The "we're friendly" thing is bullshit.
> Async is highly problematic
Also agree here. Async is a huge wart on Rust's otherwise relatively unblemished face. Big shame. Oh well. You can mostly avoid it, and there are some cases where it's genuinely good (e.g. Embassy).
> I feel like Rust is self-defined as a “systems” language, but it’s being used to write web apps and command-line tools and all sorts of things. > > This is a little disappointing, but also predictable: the more successful your language, the more people will use your language for things it wasn’t intended for.
I don't see why he's disappointed about this. Rust is great for command line tools and web backends.
> I think that the excellent tooling and dev team for Rust, subsidized by Big Tech, pulls the wool over people’s eyes and convinces them that this is a good language that is simple and worth investing in. There’s danger in that type of thinking.
Ok this guy is not worth listening to.
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#8rust is fine, it's a solid mix of performance and expressiveness, it has good constructs and it's gaining traction
it's hard to learn so we shall see what kind of niche it can carve for itself, but it's fine
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#9So much to disagree with.... > In practice, people just want to be able to write a tree-like type without having to play Chess against the compiler. Sure, Rust's strong encouragement of tree-structured ownership may be annoying when you try and make a spaghetti ownership soup, but it's not like it doesn't have upsides. Many people have written about how the ownership & borrowing rules lead to code structure that has…
I'm curious what kind of code gets a 45x speedup by going from python to rust
and by that I don't mean the rhetorical or bait-style "i'm curious", no, the literal I'm curious, cause I'm trying to find use cases such as that these days and I'm often thwarted by the fact that for anything requiring remotely decent speeds, python most of the time already delegates to C extensions and so any rewrite is not as useful
Re: My negative views on Rust (2023)
#10> People waste time on trivialities that will never make a difference.
This is an aha moment as I read it. The complexity of your tools must be paid back by the value they give to the business you’re in.