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Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

blog.piston.rs

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#61

Does anyone has the same thought with me? The complexity of Rust is close to C++ and around equal to Java.And as many people's tought, if you don't advocate to use the GC, are there any reason to use a language which is no-simple and not faster than C++????

> And as many people's tought, if you don't advocate to use the GC, are there any reason to use a language which is no-simple and not faster than C++????

Rust was designed to be memory-safe. That means, unless you explicitly mark a section of code as "unsafe", it isn't possible to have segfaults, have buffer overflows, use memory after freeing it, etc. A very significant amount of software bugs - famously, Heartbleed, but also a huge proportion of other security bugs in everything from servers to web browsers - can't happen under Rust code. The point is to have a much more secure programming language, as in resistant to attacks, while still being as fast and as usable as other C-style languages.

The reason Mozilla are developing this is for Servo, a new browser engine which should be far safer than existing ones - although it's also useful for pretty much any other code, as it wipes out entire classes of bugs with not much effort. If you write in a C-like language today, you could pick up most of Rust (lifetimes included) in a couple of days of playing with it.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#62
post #30

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm enthused that Rust, arguably the only serious contender to C++'s throne, is gaining traction. On the other hand, I'm scared that respectable projects like Qt (~6M lines of C++, man-millenia of work!) will be considered "obsolete" by the coming generation and another cyle of wheel reinvention will begin, tossing away man-centuries worth of polished, working code on th…

>Rust, arguably the only serious contender to C++'s throne Does anyone consider Ada another contender to C++? Statically strongly typed, safe manual memory management, wide-spectrum, hard real-time & embedded capable.

I do in the areas where human lifes are at risk.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Rust, arguably the only serious contender to C++'s throne Does anyone consider Ada another contender to C++? Statically strongly typed, safe manual memory management, wide-spectrum, hard real-time & embedded capable.

Public opinion is a matter of very considerable importance in such questions, and Ada simply doesn’t have it there, while Rust does. So no, I would not consider Ada “a serious contender to C++’s throne”, regardless of technical comparisons with Rust and/or C++.

And yet, when you travel by train, plane, being monitored in an hospital, real time OS in factories, there is most likely Ada underneath.

If Rust wants to become a real systems programing language, it needs OS vendor support, not HN cheering.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#64
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public opinion is a matter of very considerable importance in such questions, and Ada simply doesn’t have it there, while Rust does. So no, I would not consider Ada “a serious contender to C++’s throne”, regardless of technical comparisons with Rust and/or C++.

And yet, when you travel by train, plane, being monitored in an hospital, real time OS in factories, there is most likely Ada underneath. If Rust wants to become a real systems programing language, it needs OS vendor support, not HN cheering.

> there is most likely Ada underneath

I have worked for quite a few real-time safety-critical systems, including one of the domains you mentioned. I have ex-colleagues who now work for other such domains. I assure you, that Ada is rarely ever seen. It's just C all the way, and usually running without an OS. I used to see job openings for Ada programmers some 15-20 years ago, but I haven't seen anyone use it in any of the firms I worked at. The only thing that seems to be changing these days is a creeping in of Matlab/Simulink-generated C code.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#65
post #30

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm enthused that Rust, arguably the only serious contender to C++'s throne, is gaining traction. On the other hand, I'm scared that respectable projects like Qt (~6M lines of C++, man-millenia of work!) will be considered "obsolete" by the coming generation and another cyle of wheel reinvention will begin, tossing away man-centuries worth of polished, working code on th…

> On the other hand, I'm scared that respectable projects like Qt (~6M lines of C++, man-millenia of work!) will be considered "obsolete" by the coming generation and another cyle of wheel reinvention will begin, tossing away man-centuries worth of polished, working code on the sole ground that it's C++.

I imagine that as soon as Rust hits something like version 1.5, we will start to see semi-automatic converters from C/C++ to Rust, something similar to the C-to-Go effort underway to get to a self-hosted Go compiler.

Qt will probably take 5 years to be ported in a decent way, but I am pretty sure that a sizeable part of that codebase will be translated without too many problems, given its relative clarity.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#66
post #64
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, when you travel by train, plane, being monitored in an hospital, real time OS in factories, there is most likely Ada underneath. If Rust wants to become a real systems programing language, it needs OS vendor support, not HN cheering.

> there is most likely Ada underneath I have worked for quite a few real-time safety-critical systems, including one of the domains you mentioned. I have ex-colleagues who now work for other such domains. I assure you, that Ada is rarely ever seen. It's just C all the way, and usually running without an OS. I used to see job openings for Ada programmers some 15-20 years ago, but I haven't seen anyone use it in any of…

Ada is alive and well. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#67
post #64
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, when you travel by train, plane, being monitored in an hospital, real time OS in factories, there is most likely Ada underneath. If Rust wants to become a real systems programing language, it needs OS vendor support, not HN cheering.

> there is most likely Ada underneath I have worked for quite a few real-time safety-critical systems, including one of the domains you mentioned. I have ex-colleagues who now work for other such domains. I assure you, that Ada is rarely ever seen. It's just C all the way, and usually running without an OS. I used to see job openings for Ada programmers some 15-20 years ago, but I haven't seen anyone use it in any of…

Kongsberg writes it's missile-guiding software in Ada. A pretty strong endorsement if you ask me.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#68

Does anyone has the same thought with me? The complexity of Rust is close to C++ and around equal to Java.And as many people's tought, if you don't advocate to use the GC, are there any reason to use a language which is no-simple and not faster than C++????

I think you're asking why you'd want to use Rust over C++? First, to establish what we're not losing by using Rust: * It can be as fast as C++ (in essentially all cases--all but compile-time metaprogramming related situations, after some in-the-works reforms are implemented). * It can be as deterministic as C++ (usable in hard realtime systems). * It has great FFI-level C compatibility. Advantages over C++: * It is s…

Currently Rust, Scala, Go and Haskell are all about equally fast, according to http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ . C, C++ and Ada are still the fastest. It's intersting to me that all the new languages are about equally fast.

Re: Conrod – A Rust GUI Library

#69
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're asking why you'd want to use Rust over C++? First, to establish what we're not losing by using Rust: * It can be as fast as C++ (in essentially all cases--all but compile-time metaprogramming related situations, after some in-the-works reforms are implemented). * It can be as deterministic as C++ (usable in hard realtime systems). * It has great FFI-level C compatibility. Advantages over C++: * It is s…

Currently Rust, Scala, Go and Haskell are all about equally fast, according to http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ . C, C++ and Ada are still the fastest. It's intersting to me that all the new languages are about equally fast.

We haven't parallelized and optimized our implementations of those benchmarks yet. I wouldn't read too much into that.
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