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Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

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Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#391

Post by tialaramex »

brundolf wrote: post #230
frankwiles wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and he’s a really cool nice guy to boot!

I almost want to call this nominative determinism I always thought it was called godbolt because it's like... Zeus blowing away the layers of compilation with his cosmic power, or something. Like it's a herculean task

Another example: eBay is because its founders solo consulting business "Echo Bay Technology Group" owned ebay.com and so when he built his auction web site on that domain everybody just called the auction site "eBay" anyway.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#392

Post by amai »

simonask wrote: post #330
globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

Novice programmers will take longer to be productive in Rust compared to Go. Rust primarily improves the productivity of people who know what they are doing, because it gives them much better tools to manage complexity. Games are written in C++ because game engines and tooling have person-centuries of work poured into them. Reimplementing Unreal Engine in Rust would require another few person-centuries of work, which…

Though in the future people might simply ask an AI to convert a codebase from C++ to Rust.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#393

Post by tialaramex »

monkeyelite wrote: post #351

This article compares onlye one specific feature of C++ with Rust - integral type conversions.

All of C++ has implicit type conversions. The language even has a keyword (explicit) to try to reign this in because it's so obviously a bad idea.

In Rust what they'd do if they realised there's a problem like this is make explicit conversion the default, with a language Edition, and so within a few years just everybody is used to the improved language. In C++ instead you have to learn to write all the appropriate bugfix keywords all over your software, forever.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#394

Post by tdiff »

simonask wrote: post #320
tdiff wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because cpp is not meant for "rapid prototyping" involving importing half of github with single command. And the reality is that it works.

Works for whom? C++ build systems are notoriously brittle. When porting a project to a new platform, you're never just porting the code, you are also porting your build system. Every single project is bespoke in some way, sometimes because of taste, but most of the time because of necessity. It works because people spend a huge amount of time to make it work.

Works for numerous projects which "run the world".

Everyone know the system is brittle, but somehow manage to handle it.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#395

Post by imtringued »

globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

The quality of AMD's software stack speaks for itself. It's all C++ and the quality is exactly poor as you'd expect.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#397

Post by Havoc »

globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

Go is seeing more traction in the web space - api backends and other stuff that needs lots of concurrency like that. Seen as easier to learn than rust but not quite as fine grained low level control.

Rust is a bit more systems focused for low level stuff. See inclusions in the Linux kernel. Also seeing some traction in the WASM space given that it’s not GC

They’re both quite versatile though so above are pretty gnarly generalisations.

Zig is in a similar space as these

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#398

Post by kevincox »

monkeyelite wrote: post #384
tsimionescu wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply a wrong idea about how to write web servers. You're giving up scalability massively, only to gain a minor amount of safety - one that is virtually irrelevant in a memory safe language, which you should anyway use. The overhead of process-per-request, or even thread-per-request, is absurd if you're already using a memory safe language.

> You're giving up scalability massively you’re vastly over estimating the overhead of processes and number of simultaneous web connections. > only to gain a minor amount of safety What you’re telling me is performance (memory?) is such a high priority you’re willing to make correctness and security tradeoffs. And I’m saying thats ok, one of those is crashing might bring down more than one request. > one that is virt…

> you’re vastly over estimating the overhead of processes and number of simultaneous web connections.

It's less the actual overhead of the process but the savings you get from sharing. You can reuse database connections, have in-memory caches, in-memory rate limits and various other things. You can use shared memory which is very difficult to manage or an additional common process, but either way you are effectively back to square one with regards to shared state that can be corrupted.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#399

Post by davemp »

lmm wrote: post #350
quietbritishjim wrote: post #342

I always enjoy reading articles like this. But the truth is, having written several 100s of KLOC in C++ (i.e., not an enormous amount but certainly my fair share) I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice. Perhaps it might trip me up occasionally, but will be noticed by literally just running the code once. Yes, that is an extra hurdle to trip over and resolve but that is triv…

> I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice. 95% of C++ programmers claim this, but C++ programs continue to be full of bugs, and they're usually exactly this kind of dumb bug. > will be noticed by literally just running the code once. Maybe. If what you're doing is "tricky mathematical algorithms", how would you even know if you were making these mistakes and not noticing the…

My current project is a huge C++ physics sim written over 15+ years. The most common and difficult to diagnose bug I’ve found is unit conversation mistakes. We likely wouldn’t even find them if we didn’t have concrete data to compare against.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#400

Post by devnullbrain »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #342

I always enjoy reading articles like this. But the truth is, having written several 100s of KLOC in C++ (i.e., not an enormous amount but certainly my fair share) I just almost never have problems with this sort accidental conversion in practice. Perhaps it might trip me up occasionally, but will be noticed by literally just running the code once. Yes, that is an extra hurdle to trip over and resolve but that is triv…

>code that has a lot of tricky mathematical algorithms in it, rather than just "plumbing" data between different sources

Your hierarchy is backwards. Borrowing for algorithmic code is easy, it's for writing libraries that can be used by others where it's hard. Rust lets you - makes you - encode in in the API in a way C++ can't yet express.

> I just very rarely have problems with memory errors in C++ code bases with a little thought applied to lifetimes and use of smart pointers

If these are sparing you C++ bugs but causing you to struggle with the borrow checker, it's because you're writing code that depends on constraints that you can't force other contributors (or future you) to stick to. For example, objects are thread-unsafe by default. You can use expensive locks, or you can pray that nobody uses it wrong, but you can't design it so it can only be used correctly and efficiently.

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