31–40 of 68 posts
This post advocates rewriting incrementally instead of all at once. Just like Joel said back in 2000, and like everyone continues to always say to this day. Yet in practice, people don't actually do this; complete rewrites in Rust remain far more common than incremental ones, particularly when rewriting from a language other than C. The high-profile exceptions, like Linux, Windows, and Firefox, are codebases so huge…
Well yeah, that has obvious practical reasons: unless you're using C/C++, you can't really link Rust code with your codebase (or you could theoretically do it, but in a way that would affect performance and/or complicate your architecture). So, if you're going to do it at all, a full rewrite makes more sense.
Is this really an alternative? I would never replace battle proved TeX with consistent syntax, build for processing text, with great fonts, thousands of plugins for some Markdown mess, which is, in addition, paid.
Only because it is written in Rust, not in C.
For a brief second I thought JetBrains were rewriting their tools in Rust and we were going to get some performance improvements.
I understand that's a guest post in Jetbrains blog, and these guests could very well be real people, project maintainers, conference speakers and whatnot, but I feel they used LLM so heavily that it reads like a slop. Pease do better next time.
Amidst this, just let me try to give my own experience with language while working in a field where it doesn't have much traction (scientific/numerical programming). A couple of years ago, after being tired trying to make Python faster, I was looking for a language to write simulation code in. Fortran (and C/C++) has been the go-to choice in my field for decades but I wanted to try a modern language. I tried Julia but the workflow didn't come naturally to me. Also by default, it also wasn't ahead-of-time compilable. Rust was my second choice but it's type system/design, expressiveness and tooling (rust-analyzer) won me over. I have written so much of it and I really enjoy writing it. Borrow checker isn't really an issue 99% of time when writing scientific code. And when it is (self-referential data structures), you can just use an arena (or something equivalent). The C/Fortran inter-op is great so it's still so easy for me to build my own abstractions on top for the more general stuff like solving ODEs and sparse matrices.
And of course, there is speed, memory safety and ability to parallelize things so effortlessly (rayon is magical), but I feel those were never the things that actually won me over. The language was just a joy to write.
"Typst instead of LaTeX" Is this really an alternative? I would never replace battle proved TeX with consistent syntax, build for processing text, with great fonts, thousands of plugins for some Markdown mess, which is, in addition, paid. Only because it is written in Rust, not in C.
I'd argue the syntax is much simpler, more modern, and perhaps even more consistent (the fact that in TeX you can change the meaning of the escape symbol or the comment symbol is pure insanity IMHO). It can use any font, and the feature you know from LaTeX, a compiler, is free. Only the web application has some premium features. It's more like Overleaf. It's also several orders of magnitudes faster and has actually helpful error messages.
The fact that it was written in Rust is less than secondary.
Also, TeX was written in WEB, not C.
I would love it if jetbrains were to speed up IntelliJ. I started a new job writing Java professionally last year and, up that point, I had no idea that IDE's could actually be that slow. My company gave me a brand new, beefy Macbook pro and that thing can barely handle IntelliJ sometimes...
Just use VS Code. Its Java support isn’t the best, but it’s good enough and the rest of the IDE makes up for it. I feel like a lot of the love for IntelliJ is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome combined with relief at not using Eclipse.