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Rewriting Rust

josephg.com

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Re: Rewriting Rust

#11

Post by culebron21 »

feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…

I think every tech eventually is taken to its limits, no matter that it enabled you things that were earlier impossible. With Rust, I made projects I wouldn't dare to in Python or weren't ever able to in C. You may think what people can do with MS Excel that was impossible with a desktop/pocket calculator, but also look at how huge Excel books can get that it starts crashing. I'd say Rust delivers well on most promises, but as your projects grow, you start getting unexpected costs, like every dependency bringing a dozen of others, and compile times getting longer and longer.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#12

Post by knighthack »

Since Rustaceans are so neurotic about rewriting everything in Rust, I genuinely thought that an article about rewriting Rust (in Rust) had to be a meta-satirical joke.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#13

Post by antonvs »

panick21_ wrote: post #10
feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…

No language can continue to add freatures at speed, specially not a low level one. Rust development is going fine, crickets is just inaccurate. It just takes a while to add new stuff with zero overhead and backwards compadible.

> Rust development is going fine, crickets is just inaccurate.

Yeah. This is someone who's frustrated that he doesn't wake up to headlines that read "Hey babe, new Rust feature just dropped".

If that's what he's looking for, he should probably switch to the Javascript ecosystem.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#14

Post by imron »

feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” ― Bjarne Stroustrup

Re: Rewriting Rust

#15

Post by dist1ll »

I think the dependency situation is pretty rough, and very few folks want to admit it. An example I recently stumbled upon: the cargo-watch[0] crate.

At its core its a pretty simple app. I watches for file changes, and re-runs the compiler. The implementation is less than 1000 lines of code. But what happens if I vendor the dependencies? It turns out, the deps add up to almost 4 million lines of Rust code, spread across 8000+ files. For a simple file-watcher.

[0] https://crates.io/crates/cargo-watch

Re: Rewriting Rust

#16

Post by dwattttt »

feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…

The article doesn't go into detail about the unstable features, that's not just a list of features that haven't been released yet. Some are experiments whose result will be "can't or shouldn't be done".

Some are things that will never be stable, because they're not a feature; as an example, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/90418

Re: Rewriting Rust

#17

Post by maverwa »

I think there are fair complaints and good ideas in this. But I also think thats a bit hypocritical: They complain that there is a gigantic backlog of features in progress (as in "not in stable yet"), and then goes on to propose a lot of additional, quite fundamental and far reaching featues they'd like to see.

Don't get me wrong: I'd like coroutines and a lot of other unstable/hidden features done as well. Function traits sound great, and I'd also like the whole Pin stuff to be easier (or gone?).

But please, "Lets just extend the borrow checker and fix that" sounds very demeaning. Like no one even tried? I am by far no expert, but I am very sure that its not something you "just" go do.

I like most of the proposed features and improvements, I mostly share the critique on the language, but I do not thing the "why not just fix it?" attitude is helpful or warranted. Theres tons of work, and only so much people & time.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#18

Post by hnlmorg »

culebron21 wrote: post #8

I think adding per-crate permissions to do undoable/unsafe things will lead us to permissions hell of devops in big deployments. Like Amazon S3 with gazillion options. I think it's time to do something radically different with 3rd party deps. Even if we put aside safety issues, each crate brings ~10 more dependencies by default (i.e. without any features turned on), which bloats compile times. Maybe it's better to be…

That’s a solution people already use (vendering and / lock files) but it doesn’t solve this particular problem.

The closest to a solution we have is dependency scanning against known CVEs.

Having per-crate permissions is, I think, the only way languages can evolve past this hell hole we call supply chain attacks. It’s not a silver bullet, there will be edge cases that can be bypassed and new problems it creates. But if it reduces the scope of where supply chains can attack and what they can do, then that’s still a massive win.

Re: Rewriting Rust

#19

Post by rtpg »

The function trait section reminded me about effect systems and Purescripts row polymorphism[0], which is a great little way to be able to encode properties of your functions.

I think Rust might quickly run into the “negative trait” problem trying to get that working, while embracing an effect system like Purescripts might get you the goods in a “principled” way. Though I haven’t thought about this deeply.

[0]: https://rtpg.co/2016/07/20/supercharged-types.html

Re: Rewriting Rust

#20

Post by teschmitt »

feelingsonice wrote: post #7

>And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. Is frustration with Rust on the rise? I just started using Rust few month ago and absolutely love it. I can't tell what's going on with the Rust foundation so I can only judge by reading sentiments. Nothing would kill my…

I wouldn't worry about it too much ... learning Rust will give you an edge on learning other languages and frameworks which is the more essential skill in the long run. On the other hand, smart people who have an unimaginably in-depth knowledge of a language and its compiler will also always have objections about its development and ideas on how to move forward. Being unsatisfied with the status-quo is a big part of why languages like Rust get developed in the first place.

I know I used to crush hard on Python and also got worried when there were dissonances within the Python Foundation. But as you progress, I assume the goings-on in certain language communities will take a back-seat to thinking deeply about how to solve the problems you are professionally tasked with. At least that's my experience.

As for Rust: It's gonna be around for a while. For the past months, I've been hearing a lot of chatter about how companies are using Rust for the first time in production settings and how their developers love it.

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