I actively seek out tools written in static languages. They are less fragile and have a longer shelf life.
A Rust shaped hole
11–20 of 319 posts
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#12This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though…
TypeScript is good as a language. You can't generate static binaries out of it (except Docker images) and that itself is a deal breaker.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#13This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though…
TypeScript is good as a language. You can't generate static binaries out of it (except Docker images) and that itself is a deal breaker.
Yeah, that's definitely a huge drawback. Bun lets you get pretty close though with the `--compile` flag: https://bun.sh/docs/bundler
Too bad the binaries are 60MB at a minimum :(
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#14This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though…
TypeScript is good as a language. You can't generate static binaries out of it (except Docker images) and that itself is a deal breaker.
I mean you can, they're just inappropriately large.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#15Odin has been really growing on me lately as a language that checks all of those boxes. String types, first class allocators, built in tests, a batteries included philosophy, and ease of use are some of the things that really drew me towards it.
I really wanted to like rust and I wrote a few different small toy projects in it. At some point knowledge of the language becomes a blocker rather than knowledge the problem space, but this is a skill issue that I'm sure would lessen the more I used it.
What really set me off was how every project turned into a grocery list of crates that you need to pull in in order to do anything. It started to feel embarrassing to say that I was doing systems programming when any topic I would google in rust would lead me to a stack overflow saying to install a crate and use that. There seemed to be an anti-DIY approach in the community that finally drew me away.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#16I’m not sure what his abstraction column really means, nuts and bolts-wise. But, Fortran is native, you get to allocate your own memory, and it has object oriented features (maybe that’s abstraction).
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#17I don't think you need an elaborate process of elimination when one of your axioms is "must manage memory manually".
> Memory management was indeed the sore sticking point, why Rust hadn't appealed to me earlier.
The author doesn't want manual memory management, but still decides to go with Rust.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#18This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though…
TypeScript is good as a language. You can't generate static binaries out of it (except Docker images) and that itself is a deal breaker.
I'd love to see someone develop a compiler for TypeScript that got, say, Ocaml-like performance. There's a bunch of reasons why that'd be tough though - you'd probably want a language very-similar-to-but-not-quite-like-TypeScript.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#19Very cool, I wish the author good luck! I've been writing a compiler in Rust for a few months now and I absolutely love it. The ways it solves most of the problems it addresses feel like the "right" way to do things.
There are some things that feel a little weird, like the fact that often when you want a more complex data structure you end up putting everything in a flat array/map and using indices as pointers. But I think I've gotten used to them, and I've come up with a few tricks to make it better (like creating a separate integer type for each "pointer" type I use, so that I can't accidentally index an object array with the wrong kind of index).
Rust is one of those languages that change how you think, like Haskell or Lisp or Forth. It won't be easy, but it's worth it.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#20It is a bit unclear to me why somebody who rejects C++ because "I once spent an entire year in the heaven of C++, walking around in a glorious daze of std::vector and RAII, before one day snapping out of it and realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand." (which I can absolutely agree with!) is picking Rust from all options. If there is a language that can rival C++ in terms of complexity, it is Rust.