The struggle with Rust
ayende.com
The struggle with Rust
1–10 of 301 posts
Re: The struggle with Rust
#2These kinds of articles are always hostages to fortune. Because I guarantee somebody, any second now, will demonstrate that what the author wanted to do was trivial, and if he'd spent a bit less time trying to start flamewars on Hacker News he'd have discovered it.
Not me, by the way, I don't know rust. But I reckon it'll be about three comments down.
Re: The struggle with Rust
#3These kinds of articles are always hostages to fortune. Because I guarantee somebody, any second now, will demonstrate that what the author wanted to do was trivial, and if he'd spent a bit less time trying to start flamewars on Hacker News he'd have discovered it. Not me, by the way, I don't know rust. But I reckon it'll be about three comments down.
It is already in the comments at the site of the article.
To quote "Will": "On the bright side it is possible to implement a pretty elegant solution to this particular problem"
Re: The struggle with Rust
#4These kinds of articles are always hostages to fortune. Because I guarantee somebody, any second now, will demonstrate that what the author wanted to do was trivial, and if he'd spent a bit less time trying to start flamewars on Hacker News he'd have discovered it. Not me, by the way, I don't know rust. But I reckon it'll be about three comments down.
But in any case, it will be helpful for other newcomers to Rust because they are likely to run into the same challenges.
Re: The struggle with Rust
#5These sorts of articles are starting to pop up a bit more frequently, presumably because Rust is starting to get a bit of traction. The theme is "I know $LOW_LEVEL_LANGUAGE therefore I should be able to program Rust. I spent a few days and couldn't. I don't like Rust."
Unfortunately, things aren't that simple and Rust really is different from other languages. It takes months of steady investment (and yes, frustration), but the payoffs are spectacular. I would urge the author to persevere. In the meantime, the community is very helpful and I'm sure you'll get lots of useful advice on the back of this post.
Re: The struggle with Rust
#6Yes, it is hard to use mutable shared values Rust. This is exactly the point.
Re: The struggle with Rust
#7These kinds of articles are always hostages to fortune. Because I guarantee somebody, any second now, will demonstrate that what the author wanted to do was trivial, and if he'd spent a bit less time trying to start flamewars on Hacker News he'd have discovered it. Not me, by the way, I don't know rust. But I reckon it'll be about three comments down.
I think part of the problem is this: if you're say, a C++ programmer, you can write C++ in most other languages and have a working program, even if it's not idiomatic.
You can't in, say, SQL, Rust, or Lisp. That doesn't make them a priori harder than other languages, it just requires a shift in thinking, whereas if you're jumping to say, Java after C++, you can get started right away and hopefully pick up idiomatic Java as you go along.
Instead of thinking "here's how I would implement this in C++, now how do I translate that to Rust?" you have to cut that part out and think "how do I write this in Rust?" I mentioned SQL because that's where that really, really, clicked for me: if you ever write SQL and think imperatively, you are doing it wrong, you have to think in sets, and once you do that, SQL is the easiest and most natural thing in the world. The Rust Book is pretty good, but I think it would really benefit from an in-depth section early on explaining how writing in Rust requires a paradigm shift in your thinking, and exactly how to think Rust-ically. I'd write something here, but I'm still learning how. :)
Re: The struggle with Rust
#8Yes, it is hard to use mutable shared values Rust. This is exactly the point.
So how do you avoid it?
Re: The struggle with Rust
#9These sorts of articles are starting to pop up a bit more frequently, presumably because Rust is starting to get a bit of traction. The theme is "I know $LOW_LEVEL_LANGUAGE therefore I should be able to program Rust. I spent a few days and couldn't. I don't like Rust." Unfortunately, things aren't that simple and Rust really is different from other languages. It takes months of steady investment (and yes, frustration…
Exactly. The fact that rust is easier than most low level languages made the high level language crowd forget than bare metal programming IS HARD. Try to do a big project in C++ or C and you'll see that making something that is production worthy takes months.
Besides, as a Python trainer I can make you productive in it in a few days. But it will still take a lot of time for you to be good at it. The only difference with rust is that the first "reward stimuli" comes later down the road because you need to be better at it than at Python to make use of it.