Has anybody heard if they've finalized a spec yet, or at least come close? I've thought about getting into Rust from time to time, but the lack of a finalized spec and/or stable reference implementation has always scared me off.
Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
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Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#12Has anybody heard if they've finalized a spec yet, or at least come close? I've thought about getting into Rust from time to time, but the lack of a finalized spec and/or stable reference implementation has always scared me off.
We're getting close. Rust 0.4 (hopefully to be released next week, assuming no more schedule slips) will be quite close to final syntax-wise. Although not all the features will be implemented, your code will be mostly backwards-compatible.
If you'd like to try out the language, I recommend working off git master rather than 0.3; the language has been dramatically simplified in Rust 0.4.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#13Has anybody heard if they've finalized a spec yet, or at least come close? I've thought about getting into Rust from time to time, but the lack of a finalized spec and/or stable reference implementation has always scared me off.
We're getting close. Rust 0.4 (hopefully to be released next week, assuming no more schedule slips) will be quite close to final syntax-wise. Although not all the features will be implemented, your code will be mostly backwards-compatible. If you'd like to try out the language, I recommend working off git master rather than 0.3; the language has been dramatically simplified in Rust 0.4.
Excellent, thanks for the update! :)
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#14Rust is what I had hoped Go would be. Google employs some of the brightest computer science minds in the world and turns out stuff like Go and Dart, which seem to be more aimed at enterprise Java programmers rather than computer scientists or programming enthusiasts.
Maybe because that's what Google needs its own programmers to learn right now. Although, they should make a language that's meant to eventually replace Java/Dalvik for Android as well, and a language that's very easy to use and learn.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#15I cannot wait to go and explain to senior management how their new and shiny VM deployment tool is written in Rust.
It definitely won't raise any eyebrows.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#16Has anybody heard if they've finalized a spec yet, or at least come close? I've thought about getting into Rust from time to time, but the lack of a finalized spec and/or stable reference implementation has always scared me off.
There is no finalized spec (and the spec has actually fallen quite far behind for the moment), nor do I expect anything about Rust to be called 'final' for a while yet.
The upcoming 0.4 release (any day now) makes a big push to get a lot of the syntax pieces in place, but still has many rough edges. Beyond that the standard library is still an incomplete and inconsistent stew of different styles.
Rust is still firmly alpha software, but should stabilize significantly in the next year.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#17Rust is what I had hoped Go would be. Google employs some of the brightest computer science minds in the world and turns out stuff like Go and Dart, which seem to be more aimed at enterprise Java programmers rather than computer scientists or programming enthusiasts.
Neither Mozilla nor Google are particularly keen to faff around designing languages for the hell of it. :)
Google needed to ease the burden of hours-long Java/C++ compile times on massive projects. Hence Go.
Mozilla needed a language that was as fast as C++, but safer and trivially parallelizable. Hence Rust.
Beyond these goals, the fact that the rest of the world is excited for these languages is just gravy.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#18Out of mild concern over the title (not that it ought to be changed, TFA doesn't really have a meaningful title), I'd like to preemptively defuse any potential flame war. Go and Rust are not really competing. There may be some overlap in domain, but they occupy different niches and will likely appeal to different crowds. Go will appeal more to people who prefer its focus on conceptual simplicity and its "opinionated"…
Does Go not have higher order functions and pattern matching? If not, are they on the roadmap?
Go does not have pattern matching. There are type assertions, but obviously that's not the same thing.
Go has higher order functions in some sense, and the standard libraries use them for some things. But I wouldn't say they're nearly as ubiquitous as they are in Ruby or your average functional language. My read is that Go is pretty firmly grounded in imperative-land.
Regardless, since Go 1 came out relatively recently, I doubt they're going to make substantial changes to the language anytime soon. Obvs I don't speak for them, etc etc.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#19I see Rust has ADTs and strong static typing, how much is enforced at compile time?
One thing I love about OCaml is its exhaustiveness checking. I've been doing a lot of Erlang and it feels so dangerous without the compiler telling me if I've missed a pattern, or if a clause might return the wrong type. (Dialyzer and typespecs help somewhat, but aren't nearly as nice.)
If I could have that sense of safety with Rust, I would be persuaded to investigate it sooner rather than later.
Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming
#20Rust is a very cool language, but I've never been able to get all of it in my head. Maybe part of that is because I've never actually used it, but it seems quite complex.
Maybe it's not an issue in practice, and maybe there are just not good enough docs yet, but it makes me wonder if it will be worth the complexity in the end unless your alternative is C++.