Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#141

Post by nnethercote » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 9:57 AM UTC

rokekr wrote: post #80

mbrubeck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come on. Rust started as an open-source project in 2010 (with the release of the preliminary design and OCaml compiler that Graydon had written as a hobby project). At that time, work started on the self-hosting compiler, leading to its initial 0.1 release eight months ago, and proceeding with releases every few months and steady progress toward the remaining goals on the 1.0 roadmap [1]. Just because Go was deve…

I've attended a few Go meetups here in SF already, and I haven't even seen any Rust meetups on the radar. At these Go meetups, companies are presenting what they're using Go for in production already, with great success. Go is not difficult to program in, Go is functional, Go is performant, Go is developer friendly. That is not to say that Go doesn't have warts, it does (32-bit garbage collecting anyone? or the slow…

"In my mind, at least, the gap between Rust and Go is pretty big at this point."

It's the same gap it's always been -- a few years.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#142

Post by nnethercote » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 9:57 AM UTC

rokekr wrote: post #80

mbrubeck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come on. Rust started as an open-source project in 2010 (with the release of the preliminary design and OCaml compiler that Graydon had written as a hobby project). At that time, work started on the self-hosting compiler, leading to its initial 0.1 release eight months ago, and proceeding with releases every few months and steady progress toward the remaining goals on the 1.0 roadmap [1]. Just because Go was deve…

I've attended a few Go meetups here in SF already, and I haven't even seen any Rust meetups on the radar. At these Go meetups, companies are presenting what they're using Go for in production already, with great success. Go is not difficult to program in, Go is functional, Go is performant, Go is developer friendly. That is not to say that Go doesn't have warts, it does (32-bit garbage collecting anyone? or the slow…

"In my mind, at least, the gap between Rust and Go is pretty big at this point."

It's the same gap it's always been -- a few years.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#143

Post by neilk » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 10:03 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #136

neilk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people. No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches. At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators…

Visual basic. C#. Powershell. F#. Javascript. Erlang. Fortran. Objective-C. All languages developed intentionally by corporations. Additionally, there have been languages developed by committees, such as ALGOL, COBOL, CPL, Haskell, Ada, and many others.

Yeah, I admit my comment was not all that well thought out.

I was reacting to the usual dumbass theory that $BIG_ORGANIZATION is executing some master plan which explains all of their actions. It explains how they filter and rank ideas, but it doesn't explain why those particular ideas happened to be floating around in their organization.

When it comes to things like new frameworks and languages, in my experience, it's usually some employee going off on their own. And the reason why the language is the way it is has more to do with that person's obsessions and interests. They later justify it to the organization by producing results and getting peer buy-in. FLOW-MATIC (ancestor of COBOL), Perl, Java, Sawzall, Go, and Rust seem to be like this.

The other pattern is when companies intentionally make a language to compete, or lock-in a developer platform. Now this move really is predictable, and any MBA can draw you a 2x2 matrix showing why Microsoft had to create C#. Likewise VB, PowerShell, F#, and JavaScript. It doesn't mean they are bad languages. But they are often platform specific since their whole purpose is to corral developers into one camp.

I don't think Haskell counts at all. That was an academic project amalgamating other academic projects.

I don't know enough about the others you mention. Maybe this isn't a useful way to think about programming languages, but I was just exploring the idea by rambling about it. ;)

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#144

Post by primitur » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 10:28 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #69

I'm a die-hard C guy. My motto for years has been "you can pry pointers and address spaces from my cold, dead hands." Of the new languages I've seen lately, Rust is my favorite. I love how it gives me better ways to express things I actually want to say without imposing GC on me. But even so, I can't see myself actually using it for much, because writing in a language other than C means buying in to that language's r…

I'm a C die-hard as well.

Tell you what I'm doing lately, that makes me less and less interested in the new-school elite, and just generally enjoying a language 'enigma' moment: putting Lua in everything.

That is, I mean to say, Rust is neat and all but we can do it all in Lua, pretty well, too. Table types are fabulous, kids!

And being able to take any collection of C libraries, and glue them together into 'ones own runtime' with a common language framework/boundary, means a lot.

So, yes, of course.. Lua isn't fast, it has weaknesses, there is luaJit and so on: its not about Lua. Its about the fact that you can choose whatever languages are out there, get competent at their adept usage, and win.

I believe that Rust will be a systems programming language when there is a bootable Rust OS that boots to an editor, a shell, a means of interacting with devices, and a Rust compiler sitting there, waiting for input .. until then, it sure is fun to watch the new school language paradigms get all twisty and bent in the rush to school someone on how systems 'should be programmed, instead of the way they are now'. Research in this field is a terrifically interesting social cache.

Has anyone done a RustOS? Is there one? I know of a couple LuaOS projects, and it sure seems to me like what was done with Linux on Android could be done to Linux, again, with Lua .. Rust .. and so on. Could be very cute times ahead, in the distribution mecca .. GoboLinux, but instead 100% booted to Lua? Hmm .. bogglethink .

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#145

Post by pron » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 11:32 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #72

haberman wrote: post #69

I'm a die-hard C guy. My motto for years has been "you can pry pointers and address spaces from my cold, dead hands." Of the new languages I've seen lately, Rust is my favorite. I love how it gives me better ways to express things I actually want to say without imposing GC on me. But even so, I can't see myself actually using it for much, because writing in a language other than C means buying in to that language's r…

"If write a library in Rust, how can I expose my types and algorithms to Ruby, Python, Lua, etc?" The same way you expose them in C. Rust and C are compatible at the binary level. "How will Rust Tasks play with Python threads?" More or less the same way C setcontext()/swapcontext() workalikes play with Python threads. We probably want a runtime-less Rust to allow users who aren't using tasks at all to just omit the w…

> The language itself knows nothing about tasks; they're purely part of the runtime library.

How are they implemented? Do you provide access to low level concurrency constructs such as CAS, threads etc.?

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#146

Post by lmm » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

zxcdw wrote: post #85

tbrownaw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm yet to see major companies investing millions, if not billions of capital on a system written in declarative languages. We all "know" functional programming "is the future", but yet nobody trusts their money and time on them. SQL is declarative. Erlang is kinda-sorta functional, and was developed specifically to run expensive high-uptime telecom systems.

...both of which are domain specific languages, or developed as such. I really think C++ is going to gnaw "market share" from C in any low-level domains and fight back Go and other competitors in high-level systems programming domains thanks to it's recent C++11 standard and upcoming standard library extensions which being the transition of making it much more on-par with other modern languages. Bjarne Stroustrup(the…

JLS7 is ~600 pages; the latest draft I could find (because apparently the actual standard isn't available online, a problem in itself) for C++11 was over 1200.

I very much doubt a version bump will stem C++'s decline; while it contains plenty of improvements there are no really radical changes. What are the changes that you think will make people who chose C or go over C++03 switch to C++11?

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#147

Post by kombine » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 12:46 PM UTC

haberman wrote: post #69

I'm a die-hard C guy. My motto for years has been "you can pry pointers and address spaces from my cold, dead hands." Of the new languages I've seen lately, Rust is my favorite. I love how it gives me better ways to express things I actually want to say without imposing GC on me. But even so, I can't see myself actually using it for much, because writing in a language other than C means buying in to that language's r…

The whole idea of modern systems languages like Rust or D is actually to avoid the need of using Python, Ruby etc. The language covers all your needs in a nice coherent package from top to bottom.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#148

Post by argv_empty » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

philhippus wrote: post #134

>Stack-allocated data lets you often avoid dynamic allocation overhead and garbage collection (even closures can sometimes be entirely on the stack). There's an entire website named after the results of over-using the stack. Smart pointers and move semantics in C++11 completely smoke GC and memory management everywhere else. While I'm sure Rust is a nice language and I applaud its innovation,there's already a perfect…

Smart pointers and move semantics in C++11 completely smoke GC and memory management everywhere else.

Aside from having to enforce proper pointer usage at runtime, whereas Rust does it at compile time.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#149

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

kombine wrote: post #147

haberman wrote: post #69

I'm a die-hard C guy. My motto for years has been "you can pry pointers and address spaces from my cold, dead hands." Of the new languages I've seen lately, Rust is my favorite. I love how it gives me better ways to express things I actually want to say without imposing GC on me. But even so, I can't see myself actually using it for much, because writing in a language other than C means buying in to that language's r…

The whole idea of modern systems languages like Rust or D is actually to avoid the need of using Python, Ruby etc. The language covers all your needs in a nice coherent package from top to bottom.

His use case is writing libraries that can be re-used broadly.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#150

Post by cgh » Thu, Sep 27, 2012, 2:17 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #136

neilk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people. No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches. At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators…

Visual basic. C#. Powershell. F#. Javascript. Erlang. Fortran. Objective-C. All languages developed intentionally by corporations. Additionally, there have been languages developed by committees, such as ALGOL, COBOL, CPL, Haskell, Ada, and many others.

Objective-C was developed mostly by one guy (Brad Cox) back in the '80s. He was inspired by Smalltalk. He didn't do it on behalf of any corporation that I know of, though he and a partner did try to commercialize it later.