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Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

winningraceconditions.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#131

Post by BrandonM »

From the end of the last post in the series (http://winningraceconditions.blogspot.com/2012/09/rust-4-typ...):

    let arc = RWARC(some_data);
    for num_cpus().times {
        let arc2 = clone(&arc);
        do task::spawn |move arc2| {
            process_data(arc2); // might read, write, whatever
        }
    }
    let modified_data = unwrap(move arc); // blocks on all child tasks at once
    // do more of the algorithm, etc.
This is a nice fork/join pattern, allowing implementations with minimal copying and reasonable safety. If this is indicative of design decisions made by the creators of Rust, I think it looks pretty good.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#132

Post by surrealize »

phaemon wrote: post #127
eevee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it won't work yet! Tragic. In the meantime, I can deliberate on whether or not to call it FOXDIE.

Surely "Pyrite"?

Awesome :)

For those with even less of a chemistry background than I have: rust is iron oxide, and pyrite is iron sulfide. It's a good analogy because oxygen and sulfur are in the same group (column) in the periodic table, so they have some chemical similarities.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#133

Post by p0nce »

reinhardt wrote: post #123
eevee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I like Rust because I like Python. Python does strive to have one "obvious way to do it", but that ends up meaning it has a very colorful toolbox full of different ways to solve different problems, much like Rust. Generators, context managers, metaclasses, decorators, and descriptors are all very different mechanisms, but they all work together well. Hell, I keep discovering that Rust has already…

Would be interesting to read a comparison with D. And no, "obscure" is not a meaningful description when comparing it to a language still at v0.3.

I have used D but no Rust yet. They look superficially similar.

On the Rust side, algebraic data types, an AST macro system, saner tuples, non-nullable and immutability by default. I'm a bit skeptic about the different pointer types and how they will interact with meta-programming.

On the D side, many good things like unittest(), best-in-class overloading support, compile-time everything, etc.

http://laser.inf.ethz.ch/2012/slides/Alexandrescu/2-D%20cour...

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#134

Post by philhippus »

>Stack-allocated data lets you often avoid dynamic allocation overhead and garbage collection (even closures can sometimes be entirely on the stack).

There's an entire website named after the results of over-using the stack. Smart pointers and move semantics in C++11 completely smoke GC and memory management everywhere else.

While I'm sure Rust is a nice language and I applaud its innovation,there's already a perfectly good wheel.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#135

Post by mseepgood »

zxcdw wrote: post #124
grey-area wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of companies who have spent millions on developing their websites, written in a variety of the languages you list as 'toy' languages, or even PHP. Whether they would have been better to use other languages is impossible to say of course, but these languages are being used for significant projects. The use of the pejorative 'toy' is not very useful, and likely to evoke emotional reactions. Go was insp…

I'm aware of what and why Go came to be, and I can easily relate to the reasons(I've read the blog post). I am by no means saying C or C++ as languages are perfect, nothing is. However, as I mentioned in my another reply to sanderdj, there's huge investment in effort for the abstractions the two languages build. It's very hard to tackle the problem of existing codebase for example, as that requires building stuff fro…

> No books. Nothing.

No books?

Go in Action; Evan Shaw; Manning; http://www.manning.com/shaw/

An Introduction to Programming in Go; Caleb Doxsey; http://www.golang-book.com

Network Programming with Go; Jan Newmarch; Free e-book; http://jan.newmarch.name/golang/

Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century; Mark Summerfield; Addison-Wesley Professional; http://qtrac.eu/gobook.html

The Way To Go: A Thorough Introduction To The Go Programming Language; Ivo Balbaert; iUniverse

The Go Programming Language Phrasebook; David Chisnall; Addison-Wesley Professional

The Go Programming Language (upcoming); Brian Ketelsen; The Pragmatic Bookshelf; http://pragprog.com/book/bkgo/the-go-programming-language

Learning Go; Miek Gieben; Free e-book; http://www.miek.nl/projects/learninggo/index.html

Systemprogrammierung in Google Go: Grundlagen, Skalierbarkeit, Performanz, Sicherheit; Frank Müller; Dpunkt Verlag; http://dpunkt.de/buecher/3449.html

Programmierung in Google Go: Einstieg, Beispiele und professionelle Anwendung; Rainer Feike, Steffen Blass; Addison-Wesley

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#136

Post by InclinedPlane »

neilk wrote: post #47
kibwen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Mozilla nor Google are particularly keen to faff around designing languages for the hell of it. :) Google needed to ease the burden of hours-long Java/C++ compile times on massive projects. Hence Go. Mozilla needed a language that was as fast as C++, but safer and trivially parallelizable. Hence Rust. Beyond these goals, the fact that the rest of the world is excited for these languages is just gravy.

You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people. No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches. At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators…

Visual basic. C#. Powershell. F#. Javascript. Erlang. Fortran. Objective-C.

All languages developed intentionally by corporations.

Additionally, there have been languages developed by committees, such as ALGOL, COBOL, CPL, Haskell, Ada, and many others.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#137

Post by ww520 »

zaphar wrote: post #114
tedunangst wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% sure that remark is in regard to C++. If it's about java, then it's just not true...

You've obviously never compiled java at google :-)

I think that's because they have a lots of Java code to compile. When there are a lot of GO codes to compile, it will take hours as well. I doubt GO's compile speed is significantly faster than Java. Both of them don't have the dependency problem plaguing C++. It would be interesting to compare the two.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#138

Post by fauigerzigerk »

kibwen wrote: post #6

Out of mild concern over the title (not that it ought to be changed, TFA doesn't really have a meaningful title), I'd like to preemptively defuse any potential flame war. Go and Rust are not really competing. There may be some overlap in domain, but they occupy different niches and will likely appeal to different crowds. Go will appeal more to people who prefer its focus on conceptual simplicity and its "opinionated"…

Of course they compete. People aren't born with a gene that puts them into exactly one of the camps you describe. These ideas compete and so do the languages, provided they can be used for largely the same tasks, which seems to be the case.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#139

Post by crucialfelix »

phaemon wrote: post #127
eevee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it won't work yet! Tragic. In the meantime, I can deliberate on whether or not to call it FOXDIE.

Surely "Pyrite"?

There was a music software language called Pyrite. It ran inside of Max graphic programming environment. It then evolved into SuperCollider which is now one of the most used music programming languages in experimental and academic music. Http://github.com/supercollider

But that pyrite hasn't been active for a long time.

Re: Why I think Rust is the "language of the future" for systems programming

#140

Post by cygx »

cmccabe wrote: post #95
megaman821 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As languages, nothing. In design, their conservative nature.

Go is not a conservative language. A conservative language would be something like D, which is mostly a clone of C++ with a few extra features tossed in. Go is a highly opinionated language with at least three big new ideas: * goroutines for concurrency ("Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating") * a new type system which is based on structural subtyping (some people have called this static…

Except these big new ideas have been around for decades, some of them for nearly half a century.

You're right that Go is not conservative, though, but retro, trying to mitigate the damage done by C and C++.

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