Was Rust Worth It? • Hacker News Board

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#11

Post by ramranch » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

dhosek wrote: post #6

chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use. Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which i…

Agreed. The other thing I don’t really like is that you can’t split up things in the rust namespace hierarchy between crates (something that’s natural with jars in JVM). I would have liked to have defined things so that I could have the unicode handlers for finl live in finl::unicode, the parser in finl::parser, etc. but because they’re in separate crates rust gets upset about finl being defined twice and there’s no…

Would re-exporting partially solve your problem?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#12

Post by treyd » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

rochak wrote: post #3

chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use. Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which i…

Go made a great decision to namespace packages via this Github style.

And the horrible decision to not make library-level ("module") and code-unit-level ("package") namespacing orthogonal. The former was an afterthought tacked on since the package system was designed to be used only within Google's monorepo and little care was paid to how it would work when it was released to the public and used more generally.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#13

Post by raggi » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

Learning when to invest in type constraints and when not to is an important lesson. It’s not unique to rust, though it might express a little differently. I’ve dealt with excessively typed c++ and excessively abstracted and typed Java and they have the same class of refactoring problems. I’ve also dealt with plenty of undertyped and under documented go, where there are specific values all over the place which turn into runtime footguns - and these can be truly dire to refactor as well, you get an earlier sense of progress but you ship bugs to users most of the time. There’s no magic answer to this set of trade offs. Rust gives you tools to mostly pick your place, on this specific axis it provides an unusually broad choice.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#14

Post by miloignis » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:22 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #8

How do people prefer to compile rust programs offline.

In what way? Rust (cargo technically) might have the best support for offline compilation of any language I use. `cargo vendor` does pretty much everything I want it to.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#15

Post by alpaca128 » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #5

chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use. Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which i…

URLs for packages makes a lot of sense. It works well in the land of Go. It also conveniently eliminates the need for the language to have a global packages database. Upload your package to example.com/your-thing and it's released! (You can, of course, still offer a cache and search engine if you want to.)

Cargo does support URLs to git repos for dependencies. But crates.io is the official platform and almost every search I do on it returns at least one generically named entry with an empty repository that someone snatched away and never used.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#16

Post by ayakang31415 » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

I never programmed in Rust, but I had enough experience in C programming to know that segmentation faults are annoying to debug. I heard Rust prevents memory management problems at compilation level, so it forces you to create safer program. Given this, I want to ask Rust programmers here: For people who have no experience in managing memory at coding stage (basically programmer who have no experience in C-like language), can such people appreciate what Rust aims to deliver?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#17

Post by jjn2009 » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:26 PM UTC

throwaway914 wrote: post #7

I feel like Rust finally broke the idea that programmers should be in complete control and completely conscious of everything the compiler is doing. It hasn't been that way in decades, compilers are freaking magic. But Rust undid a lot of that with borrowing. People became comfortable with the compiler knowing better than them. I just wish we could relax further: We should never be explicitly iterating forward over a…

Arguably memory managed languages are the same or are you speaking to some specific slice of the available programming languages?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#18

Post by gfodor » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:26 PM UTC

Doesn't seem to answer my main question about Rust vs everything else which is what is the more joyful to work in?

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#19

Post by tantalor » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:26 PM UTC

> I started writing tests in Rust as I would in any other language but found that I was writing tests couldn’t fail.

This is a common refrain in C++ testing: if it compiles then it's probably correct.

> Rust has accounted for so many errors that many common test cases become irrelevant

In practice, if you think this way I think it's a sign that you aren't testing the right things in those other languages. You should be testing business logic, not language stuff.

If you look at your test code and think "I would test this in JavaScript, but I don't need to do that in Rust" then just delete the test.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#20

Post by yarg » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

chungy wrote: post #2

Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use. Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which i…

This needs to be resolved by every damned language. Just make signed dependencies a universal default, point to an https page for the package vendor and use the signing key from there.

Neither node nor maven ever bothered to solve this, so we end up wandering the Wild West wondering when it will be that HR, or legal, or architecture comes knocking on the door to ask what we were thinking having a dependency on a dynamic version of Left Pad.

I'd kinda like to see what Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt could come up with if they worked together on at very least a white paper and an MVP POC.