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Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

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Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people it's good at syntax and the error messages give you a good loop. But the domains rust actually makes sense in tend to be quite punishing on slop both culturally and technically.

To add to this, I find that the delta between the amount of code and pain you get with good and bad abstractions is substantially higher in rust than other languages. It's alright to muddle through in Python or TS, but with Rust bad abstractions are punishing. LLMs are pretty bad at picking abstractions.

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Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#372
post #141
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, showing the weather is a great excuse to ask permissions for the user location.

I've been doing forest service stuff for a year with almost no signal and often no gps without antenna and it's incredible what asks for location permission to run. My amazon bought LEDs (15+, 3-5 diff types) all check location before I can connect them. I wind up waiting 30 seconds sometimes more to turn lights on. My generator and inverter have to phone home so that lags constantly. Also I've been shadowbanned from…

I'm sure at least some of those macOS permissions prompts are spurious, but for the most part I think they're genuine red flags of poor software quality if not actual security/privacy threats. When a video game prompts for full disk access, it's probably because it wants to spray config and save files all over my home directory instead of putting them in a platform-appropriate location. When it triggers a permissions prompt about Bluetooth, it's probably using the wrong API to get input from a game controller or the wrong API for identifying what kind of input devices are present. If it triggers the "wants to control your system" prompt, it's probably trying to keep responding to input even when it's no longer the foreground application.

Sometimes the right API might not actually exist, but most of the time it's just lazy developers half-assing a port with no care for making the application behave appropriately for the platform. The prevalence of "Please don't turn off your computer while the game is saving" warnings is pretty clear proof that game devs in particular don't make any platform-specific adjustments they aren't forced to. (Game consoles usually require those warnings, but they're stupidly out of touch on a computer.)

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C++ is still indicated for systems that are optimizing for performance The only evidence I've seen for this is that people with a vested interest in my believing this keep saying it is true. That's the exact same evidence I have for Trump having triumphed in Iran. Do better if you want me to believe you. > since it intrinsically requires a lot of "unsafe" constructs. This is an excellent reason to choose Rust. The…

> This is an excellent reason to choose Rust. The whole point of Rust's technology is to enable you to encapsulate the tricky difficult part of the problem so that people don't blow their foot off working on the mundane parts of the software. And the truth is there are always mundane parts of the software. The problem is that it actually sucks for dealing with the encapsulated parts. The reason everyone loves Rust is…

The autovectorizer works quite well in llvm with all the aliasing guarantees rust gives it. Especially now fastmath hit so wide types aren't necessary anymore. I don't need unsafe or crates that use unsafe to beat the performance of c++. If you are doing something very specific with niche intrinsics llvm can't use, then maybe I'd have to use unsafe. But I don't run into that. Rust is faster for the same reasons it avoids UB. Also the Kool aid comes in multiple flavors!

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#374

With certain rough edges like complex traits and Async aside, rust is an S-tier lang in several domains. Of interest: - Embedded - PC desktop applications - Computationally-intense scientific programming. (Chem, structural bio etc) - OSes, drivers etc - High-performance tasks in general. CPU, GPU, etc. It's not a memory-safety one-trick pony; it's a well-rounded lang which has learned from its predecessors.

Yeah I'd written some rust ~ 10 years ago when the language was very different and that led me to believe that it was a 'great within it's niche' sort of thing for a long time, but after spending the last couple of years with it as a daily driver I think it's a pretty great general-purpose language. The one really common gotcha with rust is that when trying to write concurrent code, newbies tend to throw Arc > goo ar…

jdcasale you are right that Arc> is a code smell but I would take that a bit further that locking immutable data is even more of a smell. The real bad guy in this case is the RwLock not Arc. For anything that you hydrated once and never mutate you do not need the RwLock. Arc just clones the pointer so it is safe to share for concurrent reads so something like Arc is fine and if you need initialization locking then LazyLock> lets you lock the initialization but then everything else is just a pointer copy.

I hit this recently while building a url unfurl social card renderer for a project which ended up being something like LazyLock>

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#375
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of the public clash in 2025 between Christoph Hellwig which lead to the resignation of Hector Martin, lead of the Asahi Linux project. It looks like later, in December 2025, Rust was officially moved from experimental to official: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

I think what Linus pushed back on was specifically "social media brigading" as a solution to internal issues: https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292

In this case it arguably helped. I do wonder how much longer that stalemate would have gone on without the blow up.

I don’t think it’s a good policy in general. Mostly I think it would just end up in alienation and people not wanting to work with you. And Martin did leave. But he had a point and it seemed to get resolved.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#376

It’s interesting how things have changed in 25 years. Around 2001, Microsoft was crusading against open source and facing an antitrust lawsuit with Netscape. Now 25 years later, MS runs its cloud businesses with Linux, and their development in Rust.

New CEOs can do that to a company.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#377
post #122

Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest: Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 billion lines of code to rust by 2030 via automated tooling enabling "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code": https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines... DARPA work towards automating converting C code to Rust using a mix of 6 differen…

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