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Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

rustfoundation.org

461–470 of 520 posts

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#461

I hope announcements like this show that Rust is not a fledgling little language that moves fast and breaks things anymore. It's a mature, serious competitor to well established languages like C++ and C#. This is particularly important when trying to compare the experience of using Rust to other languages in the "better C/C++" space like Zig and Odin -- these are much newer and have more rough edges than Rust.

> I hope announcements like this show that Rust is not a fledgling little language that moves fast and breaks things anymore.

I bet you never heard of Microsoft. Fast, they don't move. But boy, are they slow at fixing bugs.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of stuff is why its hard to have good conversations about tooling. Windows is the best place for many kinds of software dev, but perhaps not the kind you are doing.

When it is not the mandated option, under what circumstances is Windows the best choice for software dev? The only domain I can think of is gaming, and Valve is seemingly coming up fast to eat Microsoft's lunch in the next few years.

As mentioned: gaming, most of enterprise dev, graphics/gpu/cad, desktop, certain classes of embedded. Broadly speaking, outside of hacker/web/creative culture, the default is windows.

Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.

If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#463
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A headwind makes it harder to advance in the direction you're going. I think you might have meant to say "there is a strong tailwind towards memory safety".

You're right, I better do a 360 on my comment ;)

[dead]

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#464
post #3

This is very big news, all major OS vendors that also have a role in C and C++ language tooling, now have diversified their options in systems programming languages for greenfield development. Additionally we finally get some public news about the MSVC integration rumors regarding Rust.

I'm totally disgusted that my Visual Studio 2022 instance uses 2 Gigabytes (!!) of RAM to run. What the hell is it doing that it's using that kind of memory? How about those morons solving that first before moving towards Rust. An IDE shouldn't have to use more than a 100MB of RAM tops. Anything more is inexcusable or needs a detailed explanation. BTW Firefox uses 1.1GB RAM so it's not immune from criticism either.

Vs2022 is a $1k a year product

Mainly purchased by companies not individuals and will be run on workstation pcs with a decent amount of RAM

So your complaints about 2gb are in the minority I would say, as most users don’t care. So it’s not a Microsoft priority.

After all, they are stupid enough to pay $1k a year for an IDE per seat!!!

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#465
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or if it consumes 2, 3, or 4x the memory I think this used to be true more than it is now. Memory has been relatively expensive in cloud environments for a while (often 2x the price of an ec2 node for an equivalent with 2x RAM) and DRAM shortages aren't helping.

Yeah it's more of a concern but not "rewrite a ten year old application in Rust to save on the cost of several gigabytes of RAM" bad.

For the most part yeah but does depend on scale. For Java there are lower cost migration pathways like native compilation anyway if that does become your concern

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)

Based on Grok identifying the company correctly, that would amount to ~3% of annual revenue and 30% of profits which seems insane to me for the cost of a single project. Anyway, even if that were true, rewrites are becoming drastically cheaper, simpler, and more correct with AI. The Bun rewrite is the largest experiment and seems to be 5-10x cheaper and completed ~100x faster and these costs are likely to come down f…

The rewrite was done over several years which is going to complicate your analysis. It's been making money and over fist for the company for the last 10 years and the investment to R&D has gone down some since the rewrite but not a lot.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real world systems, Java can beat programs in compiled languages like C++ and Rust when it comes to throughput and even latency.

This is so untrue I still don't know how anyone can even claim this. When I run tests in Rust, the biggest portion of the time is spent compiling the test (lets say 3-4 seconds), then the tests conclude practically instantly, in less than half a second. Meanwhile when I run tests on my JVM projects it can take 30 seconds just to start and the test execution is extremely slow too. Even if you do manage to match the pe…

They only consider programs that run for several hours. For short programs C is unbeatable.

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#468
post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but why? The MSVC backend has been falling far behind LLVM with every release. I understand they want uniformity but IMHO either they catch up or they switch fully to LLVM, if they can

Windows ecosystem, and all those things MSVC backend can do and LLVM does not. For the same reason a Rust frontend is being developed for GCC.

What are these things?

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#469
post #468
post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows ecosystem, and all those things MSVC backend can do and LLVM does not. For the same reason a Rust frontend is being developed for GCC.

What are these things?

Targeting XBox, Windows drivers in kernel mode, COM interop, structured exception handling, UWP sandboxing,

Re: Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

#470
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft doesn’t use Visual Studio internally for many of its products such as Windows.

This is a shocking news to me. Can you elaborate with sources?

Windows is built using BuildXL, a very different build system from MSbuild used in Visual Studio: https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL/blob/main/Documentation...

> BuildXL has also been proven to scale to large codebases (e.g., Windows/Office repositories) where builds can consist of millions of processes with terabytes of outputs

BuildXL is also NOT compatible with VS and they have no plans to make it so. from the readme in the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL

> There are currently no plans to integrate it into Visual Studio.

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