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‘~’ is being removed from Rust

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Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#91

Post by brson »

4bpp wrote: post #90

Orthogonally to whether this is a good or bad idea, I really wish the PR and subsequent community management had been handled more carefully for something that was pretty much bound to be a very controversial change (tellingly, /r/rust even had a preemptive thread about it before it materialised: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/236plz/thoughts_on_rem... ). Although I perhaps am in a bad position to complain aft…

The OP is, in fact, that document. You'll notice this in a pull request to Rust's RFC repo. This change has been prominently brewing in the Rust community for a long time. The fact is that people have strong opinions about Rust and this is a critical time in its development - people are going to complain.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#93

Post by mattgodbolt »

dbaupp wrote: post #82
mattgodbolt wrote: post #53

Not specifically related to this exact rust topic, but the interest in rust made me add support to my compiler explorer so you can tap rust code and see how it compiles interactively at http://rust.godbolt.org

That's very cool; how do you get colourise to associate lines to the regions of assembly?

I parse the debug line directives in the assembler output. Something about the way rust/llvm outputs with -O makes this a little worse than the equivalent in C++/clang but it's 'good enough' to get the gist of what's happening I think.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#94

Post by xiaq »

pcwalton wrote: post #89
xiaq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fn is my favorite keyword for function definition. "function" is too long. "def" doesn't say anything about functions (unless you read it as DEfine Function). "func" sounds too funny. "defun" always reads "defunct" to me. And just out of curiosity, where did the rust designers get the inspiration for "fn"? I know plan 9 rc and clojure have "fn". Or maybe it's independent invention?

Well, I slightly prefer "fun", but the Rust community pretty firmly favors "fn", and they're about the same anyway. As far as I know it came from ML.

"fun" is even funnier than "func"!

ML etymology sounds pretty plausible (I didn't know ML uses fn) since I can see there is a strong influence of ML on Rust.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#95

Post by 4bpp »

brson wrote: post #91
4bpp wrote: post #90

Orthogonally to whether this is a good or bad idea, I really wish the PR and subsequent community management had been handled more carefully for something that was pretty much bound to be a very controversial change (tellingly, /r/rust even had a preemptive thread about it before it materialised: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/236plz/thoughts_on_rem... ). Although I perhaps am in a bad position to complain aft…

The OP is, in fact, that document. You'll notice this in a pull request to Rust's RFC repo. This change has been prominently brewing in the Rust community for a long time. The fact is that people have strong opinions about Rust and this is a critical time in its development - people are going to complain.

Yeah, I've read the document, and I would hope that most other people who proceeded to debate the topic did as well. I honestly don't think that it does a commensurate job of presenting the case for it (and after reading many of the comments by proponents, I certainly am under the impression that there is a strong case for it; I just still think the case against it is stronger). A lot of the comments also show widespread uncertainty about the silent assumptions; I, for my part, am still at a loss as to why something like Cons(1, ~Cons(2, ~...)) is not an interesting or common use case according to some proponents (not necessarily restricting the question to cons-cell lists - the invoked universal utility of sharing tails, for instance, seems far less universal across the practical use cases of many other data structures).

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#96

Post by Pacabel »

dbaupp wrote: post #67
Ygg2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you had something like ~Vec > (not 100% realistic example) becomes Box ]>>>>> which really looks weird. It's like you have tire marks over your code.

Sorry, but I think that example is so unrealistic as to not really be worth discussing.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. Maybe that exact situation won't often arise, but in other languages like C++, Java and C# it's not at all uncommon to have nested collections.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#97

Post by brson »

brson wrote: post #91
4bpp wrote: post #90

Orthogonally to whether this is a good or bad idea, I really wish the PR and subsequent community management had been handled more carefully for something that was pretty much bound to be a very controversial change (tellingly, /r/rust even had a preemptive thread about it before it materialised: http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/236plz/thoughts_on_rem... ). Although I perhaps am in a bad position to complain aft…

The OP is, in fact, that document. You'll notice this in a pull request to Rust's RFC repo. This change has been prominently brewing in the Rust community for a long time. The fact is that people have strong opinions about Rust and this is a critical time in its development - people are going to complain.

I could have put some more thought into this response.

As Rust becomes more popular while we try to bring home the last few major changes, we've had this problem a few times, where the broader community is surprised and partially shocked and disappointed at a change that has been brewing for a while.

Certainly, more effort could be put into messaging and explaining how big changes are going to effect users. Figuring out how much, and what sort of, messaging is sufficient is not easy, and somebody is always going to find something objectionable about nearly everything. Additionally, Rust is still in an alpha state, in heavy development. The project is not in production mode yet.

We're always learning from mistakes and evolving the process.

Finally, Rust is in the home stretch. In some sense, we're at a stage where we need to hurry up and just get it done, at the expense of some community fallout along the way. If Rust is good, the ill will from the churn will be forgotten in time; if Rust is bad it will die. With the attention Rust is attracting, community momentum wants Rust to stop changing, but Rust must change a bit more. Rust needs to get to a point where the design can be justified and maintained for years to come, before its own popularity forces it to slow down.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#98

Post by dbaupp »

mattgodbolt wrote: post #93
dbaupp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very cool; how do you get colourise to associate lines to the regions of assembly?

I parse the debug line directives in the assembler output. Something about the way rust/llvm outputs with -O makes this a little worse than the equivalent in C++/clang but it's 'good enough' to get the gist of what's happening I think.

Oh, nice. Rust's debuginfo does seem to have a few peculiarities where lines numbers don't quite work out (or something, I haven't really been able to "quantify" it); but there's currently someone working on debuginfo.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#99

Post by Pacabel »

eevee wrote: post #59
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's a language primarily by and for text editor users, and I'm beyond that point these days. What do you mean? EDIT: Imagine a programming language designed around an IDE. Fun thought. Not sure whether it's a useful thought, but it's fun to think about.

And we shall call it Java.

That isn't really the case at all. Java (the language) is relatively small and simple. Java code can be written quite easily without an IDE. In fact, that's how it was done for many years by most Java developers, before Eclipse, NetBeans and other IDEs became more commonly used.

The unnecessarily complex design of many Java libraries and frameworks is generally what pushed developers toward using an IDE, not the language itself.

Re: ‘~’ is being removed from Rust

#100

Post by dbaupp »

Pacabel wrote: post #96
dbaupp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I think that example is so unrealistic as to not really be worth discussing.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. Maybe that exact situation won't often arise, but in other languages like C++, Java and C# it's not at all uncommon to have nested collections.

Yes sure; but it is rare to have indirection for every layer of a nested collection (i.e. each collection will essentially be a pointer to some data, with a little bit of metadata (like length & capacity for a Vec), so having Box> is a pointer to a pointer to the data: essentially pointless!).

In other words, one would write

   Vec>>
That might be considered ugly, but it's not ugliness caused by the `~` change.
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