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Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#111

Post by Aeolun »

Rochus wrote: post #83
ncmncm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

Thank you for putting it so aptly. Unfortunately for many people technology is still an emotional rather than a professional topic.

I think the two go hand in hand. I get emotional over many a professional topic.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#112

Post by lordlic »

nix23 wrote: post #77
tutfbhuf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. C++ and Rust will coexist for decades. Nah, I mean maybe in the way that Fortran coexist with C/C++ for decades, but it's not equal coexistence. I would rather say that new languages arise, replaces old ones for most scenarios and in the cases where they can't, due to various reasons, they push the old language into zombie state like cobol.

You don't replace languages but program's, go into physic-space, fortran is alive an well, go into systems programming c is alive an well, go into business java is alive and well. It's the same BS like NoSql will kill all R-D's. You just don't invest millions just to rewrite programs that work's perfectly (and that's often the case with old battle-hardened software)

The reason that RDMSes aren't dead isn't that they have too much momentum to be displaced by NoSQL. The reason they're not dead is that they're a good data model for lots of applications, and their consistency semantics and tooling provide real boosts to developer productivity.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#113

Post by lordlic »

narrationbox wrote: post #2

First mover. For a long time D targeted the same abstraction level as Go, and most of its libraries were designed with that in mind. Stuff like no_std was never a major goal for most supposed "systems languages" (that are not C/C++) until Rust came along. D was too slow in gaining momentum, getting corporate sponsorship, and adding new features that pushed the boundaries of what a systems programming language was cap…

> Go had first class tooling

Eh, I would describe go's tooling as "minimalist" or, less charitably, as "barely adequate." Pre-modules the global GOPATH approach was hacky and ugly, and post-modules the go command is a mess of contradictions straining against the backwards compatibility guarantee. And editor integration back in the day wasn't much more than running go fmt and go build.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#114

Post by taylodl »

secondcoming wrote: post #75
ncmncm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal people don't want to touch C++ anymore. Only people that think that CVEs are "just fault of bad developers" (LOL) can still be considering C++ a good language to start new projects in. Deliberately inflammatory, and also false. 1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, altho…

I've been writing C++ professionally for 16 years. I'm doing it right now in fact, but snuck on to HN while a build is underway. OP is right, unfortunately. C++ is a dying language. Mozilla, Microsoft and Google are all looking at Rust. Why? Because it's probably makes more sense to rewrite a buggy C++ component in Rust instead of updating it to use modern C++ (where admittedly, you have to go out of your way to get…

COBOL has been dying since the early 80s yet to this day more than 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in COBOL and 5 billion lines of new COBOL are written every year. If this is what a dying language looks like then yes, C++ is a dying language.

P.S. I'm not a COBOL programmer nor have I ever been a COBOL programmer.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#115

Post by juststeve »

wmf wrote: post #21
alexashka wrote: post #10

Because Rust is new and shiny. People who use Rust aren't using it to solve real world problems, they're using it to scratch a novelty itch. D is a tragedy in my opinion. It's an excellent language that just doesn't fit the political needs of any of the big players. We have Swift which is a worse version of C#, we have Go, we have Java. Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development…

The new and shiny has already moved on to Pony, Zig, or whatever.

Possibly nim as well. But We should be able to provide interop between llvm and gcc so they can all cross pollinate in some way? Not saying it’s easy, nor that I have the skills to do it, but we should be able to build across boundaries and stop soloing so much?

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#116

Post by bjourne »

Aeolun wrote: post #101
calaphos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is very very new compared to Cpp. People have decades of experience with cpp, learned in in University. Why would you throw all of that overboard just to learn a fancy new language with a weird ownership system? Keep in mind that people often still write cpp98 and have a rely hard time getting used to newer cpp concepts and programming styles. And all of that is backwards compatible with their existing codebase.

> Why would you throw all of that overboard Firstly, because 75% of all that knowledge is easily transferrable. Secondly, because you want to take 50% of your bug count.

But why not program in Python and take 100% of your bug count?

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#117

Post by timw4mail »

_bxg1 wrote: post #45
mrfusion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.

A language is more than just a technology: it's an ecosystem of libraries, platform APIs, developer mindshare and experience, familiarity, legacy codebases, product support. Don't discount the weight of all of those auxiliary, human factors. Rust, culturally, comes from the web. That's why it has the most traction in the web server/WASM space for now. It's starting to poke its head into Systems use-cases because of t…

Not really. While there is a growing set of web-based application for Rust, it's not like PHP, where the very purpose of the language is the web. Rust is a system language before it is a web language.

WASM as a target is actually a great indication that it's a system language -- performance is a primary consideration.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#118

Post by tluyben2 »

dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

> It's a C++-killer: same strengths, none of the weaknesses

Not used Rust yet, used a lot of C++; isn't a weakness that it also is extremely slow in compiling? Not sure about others but to me that's a big weakness (if it still applies, but as far as I can find on Google it does).

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#119

Post by blackrock »

juststeve wrote: post #115
wmf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new and shiny has already moved on to Pony, Zig, or whatever.

Possibly nim as well. But We should be able to provide interop between llvm and gcc so they can all cross pollinate in some way? Not saying it’s easy, nor that I have the skills to do it, but we should be able to build across boundaries and stop soloing so much?

I don’t hear much about Nim. Will this language ever take off? It seems this language needs a large corporation backing it, to get a chance to succeed.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

#120

Post by Recurecur »

mrfusion wrote: post #39
dpc_pw wrote: post #28

Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…

I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.

> But why does everyone want c++?

Few "want" C++, but for robotics a non garbage-collected language is necessary so latency is predictable. There are few mature languages besides C/C++ in that category.

Rust is an improvement, but I'm hopeful something like Julia (Julia Robotics, https://juliarobotics.org/) or Scala Native (https://scala-native.readthedocs.io/en/v0.3.9-docs/) becomes mainstream, the productivity gains would be substantial.

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