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High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

hamy.xyz

11–20 of 122 posts

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#11
I program almost all languages except C# and Rust haha.

So someone looking for the perfect languages while actively using the only two languages I actively avoid is very strange to me.

C# has close to zero community and only really works properly in Windows which is far past its glory days. Except for Microsoft aggressively pushing it as a Java alternative it has no right to exist.

Rust is an overcomplicated subset of C++ that solved memory problems the most recent versions of C++ don't have anymore, and only survives by aggressive marketing, full of grouping things together that don't belong together, like C/C++. And memory safety / use-after-free.

If C and C++ are basically the same because they have access to manual memory allocation then Rust/PHP are also basically the same.

And Rust's borrow checker only solves use-after-free which statistically are 10% of memory related vulnerabilities. Not "memory safety" of which 60-70% is just array out of bounds.

Really the worst two languages that both only survive in aggressive marketing.

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#12
Is this another AI article? What is said about Rust here has been said over and over again, and this brings nothing new to the table. They also always seem to be writing from a place of ignorance. If you're writing "high level Rust" the use of clone or Arc or whatever is negligible. If you're writing an HTTP service, your clone will be so fast it will make literally zero difference in the scope of your IO bound service.

Another observation is developer experience. Again, have you written _any_ Rust? I would argue that the reason Rust is such a joy to use is that the compile time errors are amazing, the way docs are handled are amazing, and so on. I know the eco system for something like Typescript is worlds better, but have you ever tried to _really_ understand what shenanigans are going on behind the scenes on some random hook from say, React? Their docs are so dismal and sparse and make assumptions on what they think you should know. Rust? You go to the doc gen, read what they think you should know as an overview, and if it isn't enough, I can click on "source" to dive deeper. What more could I possibly want?

Perhaps I'm just triggered. The discussion on Rust always seems to be fad or hype driven and almost always have very little to do with how it is to actually use it. If I have to read about compile times, again, I'm going to scream. Of all the languages I've used, it is one of the best in terms of a mature project needing new features or refactors. This is mentioned in some articles, but mostly we hear about "velocity" from some one dimensional perspective, usually someone from the web space, where it is arguable if the person should even bother trying to use Rust in the first place.

Apologies for the rant, but at this point I think Rust as a buzz word for article engagement has become tiring because it seems clear to me that these people aren't _actually_ interested in Rust at all. Who gives a shit what someone on Reddit thinks of your use of clone??

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#13

I program almost all languages except C# and Rust haha. So someone looking for the perfect languages while actively using the only two languages I actively avoid is very strange to me. C# has close to zero community and only really works properly in Windows which is far past its glory days. Except for Microsoft aggressively pushing it as a Java alternative it has no right to exist. Rust is an overcomplicated subset o…

You do not write Rust yet will make blanket absurd claims about Rust being overcomplicated or not solving your problems. The additional comparison of Rust to PHP is also ridiculous for so many reasons it might not be worth even discussing, because it just seems bad faith from the start.

You're missing a very fundamental point here, and this is usually something I find with long time C programmers. C is a great, but old language, with decades of overhead on context, tooling, and lib understanding that make getting in to writing C substantially more difficult than say, Rust. We are still humans, and Rust isn't entirely trying to solve C from a fundamental paradigm of handling memory from a technical point of view, but more from a programmer one. Your comment about solving memory bugs is predicated on perfect human usage of C to not write the bug in the first place, which is precisely one of the many problems Rust is looking to solve.

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#14
post #6

I agree that the rust community frowns a little too much on the use of Arc/Cloning/Box. If you use swift, everything is ref counted, why subject yourself to so much pain for marginal gain. Tutorials and books should be more open about that, instead of pushing complex lifetime hacks etc., also show the safe and easy ways. The article gives Java a worse devx rank than Go and I can't agree. Java is at least on par with…

I am not sure the community frowns on these. In fact I use those in almost every Rust code I write. The point is that i can grep for those because Rust does not do it in a hidden way.

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#15
No code examples? Wtf?

If you want to see high level rust, check out Dioxus. It's a web framework, and it's extremely React-like both in architecture but also ergonomics. I actually had AI migrate a JS project to Dioxus and I think it was something like 75% of the code. Pretty decent for a "low level" language.

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#16
Regarding TypeScript:

> but types lie at runtime (unsound) requiring you to add your own runtime checks.

I don't recall doing that outside of situations when data is crossing system boundaries.

The vast majority of languages have an unsound type system, yet people are productive in them.

Over the years I've come to realise it's a form of nitpicking. You absolutely need it in some applications, but it's not an important requirement most of the time and it's given undue importance by some.

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#17
post #6

I agree that the rust community frowns a little too much on the use of Arc/Cloning/Box. If you use swift, everything is ref counted, why subject yourself to so much pain for marginal gain. Tutorials and books should be more open about that, instead of pushing complex lifetime hacks etc., also show the safe and easy ways. The article gives Java a worse devx rank than Go and I can't agree. Java is at least on par with…

[deleted]

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#18

F# but not Scala? In TFA F# is only lacking in community and ecosystem. Scala is comparable in popularity to Go or Rust and has access to the entire Java ecosystem and JVM runtime. That should give it the five stars the author is looking for but its not considered. I think a lot of devs are missing out by not considering Scala 3. I use it with the Zio effect system which brings composable concurrency and transactiona…

> Scala is comparable in popularity to Go or Rust

Do you have any numbers to back you up? That statement sounds very, very wrong to me

Re: High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

#20
Since programming is increasingly offloaded to LLMs and English is the main way engineers interact with code, it's interesting to see how LLMs reason in different programming languages.

In our benchmarking, we've found LLMs perform comparably between languages for one-shot coding submissions, slightly favoring more popular languages. But if you give frontier LLMs a harness and let them iterate / fix compilation errors, they actually significantly outperform in Rust. Meaning, they come up with more insightful ideas when developing Rust, than for example Javascript.

Scroll down to the language comparison chart: https://gertlabs.com/?agentic=agentic

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