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A year of Rust in ClickHouse

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Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#31

Post by DeathArrow »

pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care.

What I dislike of C++ is that it grew to become a monster of a language, containing all programming paradigms and ideas, good or bad, known to mankind.

It's so monstrously huge no human can hold its entire complexity in his head.

C++ allows you to do things in 10000 different ways and developer would do just that. Often in the same code base.

That being said, I would use a sane subset of C++ every day over Rust. It's not that I hate Rust or that I don't think is good, technically sound and capable. It just doesn't fit the way I think and I like to work.

I like to keep a simple model in mind. For me, the memory is just a huge array from which we copy data to CPU cache, move some to CPU registers, execute instructions and fetch data from the registers and put it again in some part of that huge array, to be used later. Rust adds a lot of complexity over this simple mental model of mine.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#32

Post by eptcyka »

DeathArrow wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care. What I dislike of C++ is that it grew to become a monster of a language, containing all programming paradigms and ideas, good or bad, known to mankind. It's so monstrously huge no human can hold its entire complexity in his head. C++ allows you to do things in 10000 different ways and developer would do just that. Often in the same code base. That being said, I would u…

What complexity specifically does Rust add to that model?

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#34

Post by ncruces »

dep_b wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual issue wasn't Go over Rust, rather having key people responsible for C# design, on a Microsoft project, going for a Google language. While at the same time, the .NET team routinely talks about .NET image problem outside traditional Microsoft shops, which naturally decisions like this aren't helping a tiny bit.

Yeah loved the language and the IDE, but only boring Enterprise stuff built with it. Also C# got so complex, since it had to absorb every idea from F# rather than making F# a viable programming language on itself and improving interop... At a given point after being a C# programmer for years I still encountered patterns that were completely unreadable to me.

That's what happens when you have an high level VM that wants to support high level concepts from multiple high level languages, and all your languages need to be able to talk to each other.

Same thing will happen to Wasm as it decides to add more and more high level stuff “to avoid shipping multiple GCs” and “to get different languages to talk to each other.” As soon as you want to abstract over more than “a portable CPU and memory” you get into that mess.

Never worked in the past better than JVM and CLR, but let's keep trying.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#35

Post by angra_mainyu »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #12
neonsunset wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one should be abused for choosing a language Can you link to the abuse?

I recall a thread on Twitter where someone called the TypeScript developers "brain dead *tards" for using Go over Rust.

The Rust community is unfortunately plagued by this subset of devs who are zealous (and downright toxic) in their shilling for their favorite language.

Before anyone gets triggered and starts typing up a reply: "SUBSET" is the word I used.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#36

Post by joatmon-snoo »

DeathArrow wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care. What I dislike of C++ is that it grew to become a monster of a language, containing all programming paradigms and ideas, good or bad, known to mankind. It's so monstrously huge no human can hold its entire complexity in his head. C++ allows you to do things in 10000 different ways and developer would do just that. Often in the same code base. That being said, I would u…

> if you proceed with care

Yes, but that is _incredibly_ time consuming. You have to set up asan, msan, tsan, and valgrind. If you want linting you need to do shenanigans to wire up clang-tidy.

I also like simple mental models. I like not having to figure out the cmake modifications to pull in a new library. I like having a search engine when I need a new library for x. I like when libraries return Result instead of ping ponging between C libraries which indicate errors using retval flags or C++ libraries that throw std::runtime_error(). I like not dealing with void* pointer casting .

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#37

Post by angra_mainyu »

DeathArrow wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care. What I dislike of C++ is that it grew to become a monster of a language, containing all programming paradigms and ideas, good or bad, known to mankind. It's so monstrously huge no human can hold its entire complexity in his head. C++ allows you to do things in 10000 different ways and developer would do just that. Often in the same code base. That being said, I would u…

I find Zig to be a saner Rust alternative, with the caveat that it is still a immature (but getting there).

Give it a few years and it will be a very strong contender.

The true C successor.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#38

Post by ultimaweapon »

DeathArrow wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care. What I dislike of C++ is that it grew to become a monster of a language, containing all programming paradigms and ideas, good or bad, known to mankind. It's so monstrously huge no human can hold its entire complexity in his head. C++ allows you to do things in 10000 different ways and developer would do just that. Often in the same code base. That being said, I would u…

> C++ can be safe enough if you proceed with care.

The problem with this is if you have a team working on a C++ product you will need some people who can catch memory bugs to review every code before merging. Even with this approach it still possible to missed some memory bugs since the reviewer need to fully understand each object lifetime, which is time consuming during code review.

I'm working on a company that run on a server application written in C/C++. The code base is very large and we always have memory bugs that required ASAN on production to fix the bugs. We have started migrating each part to Rust one year ago and we never have a single crash from Rust code. The reason we choose Rust is because it is a server application that computation intensive, latency sensitive and large amount of active connections.

Try keep using Rust until you comfortable with it and you will like it. It fit with your simple mental model. I can say this because I was a C++ users for the whole life and switched to Rust recently.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#39

Post by j16sdiz »

Those github pr linked from the blog don't give me much confident:

Links to "Better C++" is a PR for removing c++ template for build time. Unwinding stack in a "funny" way. PR comment saying something shouldn't be public and go on merging anyway.

Re: A year of Rust in ClickHouse

#40

Post by pjmlp »

simonask wrote: post #29
pjmlp wrote: post #6

I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust. While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.…

Coming from C++, my favorite take on Rust is that it is fundamentally about productivity. Avoiding UB is a serious drain on productivity in C++, and every new language or library feature comes with additional pitfalls, increasing the mental load. This is to say: The benefit of Rust is not actually about "security critical scenarios", but much more generally about delivering the same quality of code in a fraction of t…

While I agree with the general sentiment, while it doesn't sort out all safety issues, actually programming in C++ instead of C with C++ compiler, and making use of the pleothora of analysers would already prevent many issues.

Better be 80% safer than none at all.

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