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Why is Rust difficult?

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Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#191

Post by wott »

pjmlp wrote: post #124
vardump wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're nitpicking. That's close enough in my book. Those MCUs are tricky targets and I can certainly live for example with not being able to pass structs as return values. Or without re-entrancy. Perfectly understandable once you take into account limited IRAM space, 128 or 256 bytes, where stack, register banks and most of your temporaries and globals need to reside.

Which validates my point of using C on 8 bit CPUs being a challenge.

It is not a challenge, it is by far the most common way to program them.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#192

Post by jstimpfle »

hsivonen wrote: post #103

It's a good article, but touches on a pet peeve on mine: It bothers me when people who have written C or C++ mention lifetimes as a novel concept . What's novel is that in Rust the compiler cares about lifetimes. As a concept , though, lifetimes aren't novel and thinking about lifetimes conceptually is essential to writing C or C++ that's correct enough that it can be exposed to untrusted input. It's great that the R…

Yes. And tackling vague conceptual problems by introducing a uniform mechanism and syntax leads to overcomplicated designs. That's from my experience using C++ and other languages, at least -- Rust has always intimidated me so I haven't tried it.

Many problems are actually not that hard if we start only with the truly given things. Namely at C level, or even assembler level. For example, I recently had the opportunity to convert a design based on OS threads to one employing userspace threads ("cooperative multithreading"). It was a big success, since the need for synchronisation primitives completely went away, and it was much easier to program than e.g. Javascript -- which requires callback chaining. Any language that can't give as good control as C does needs to build huge infrastructure to support approaches like that (if it at all suits the language's semantics). And strictly, even C is too much abstraction - to support green threads some non-portable parts are needed.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#193

Post by gkya »

A minor problem with Rust is aesthetics. The syntax might look cryptic at times, and error messages the compiler outputs are not everybody's cup of tea, I'd guess. These are certainly not all that important when you're considering it for the actual benefits of the language, but otherwise that is a little con for me. If you write:

  println!("Hello, {what}!", "world");
in your program, the error message you get is 16 lines long. And there seems to be no option to have terser error output.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#194

Post by kqr »

mamcx wrote: post #159
kqr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second the Ada note. That language is so well constructed and thought out on many levels. ...except the outer, most superficial level. I'm genuinely afraid that it will never "catch on" because it just looks weird. (But not weird enough to attract that kind of people.) It's a shame because - Ada generic packages are exactly what C++ templates should have been - Derived types and record extension is inheritance that m…

I have done pascal before and I wish to have ADA more easily available.

There is a free and open Ada implementation these days: GNAT, the GNU Ada Translator, is a full and complete implementation of Ada.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#195

Post by dawkins »

josephg wrote: post #76
jchw wrote: post #37

I like Rust so far, but there's a few things I think aren't true: * That Rust is only harder because it enforces 'correctness.' It certainly is harder because it enforces correctness, but it's also harder because of how . I'm not saying there's a better approach to this, but I think a lot of people are implying that there isn't, and I don't think that's a safe assumption. I think that we could find ways to make equal…

> Go is another programming language I like, ... Fearless concurrency is a wonderful feature, but for embarrassingly parallel problems Go works wonderfully. I adore Go's concurrency model but loathe go's actual language. The constant repetition in error handling, lack of generics and lack of parameterised types and Option make it feel like a children's toy set version of C instead of a useful modern language akin to…

> I'm a little bit tempted to make a simple compile-to-go language.

That's what I did for my current project. I love Go but for web apps is not the best in my opinion. I had some spare time and ended up building a VM that compiles typescript to bytecode. The performance loss is minimal, I still use the Go std library but it is a pleasure to use VS Code, generics (the VM ignores types but the TS compiler gives you static type safety, autocompletion, refactoring, etc...) Also exceptions is great for web apps where usually there is nothing else you can do but save all the info that you can and show an error to the user.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#196

Post by kqr »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #169
kqr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second the Ada note. That language is so well constructed and thought out on many levels. ...except the outer, most superficial level. I'm genuinely afraid that it will never "catch on" because it just looks weird. (But not weird enough to attract that kind of people.) It's a shame because - Ada generic packages are exactly what C++ templates should have been - Derived types and record extension is inheritance that m…

Thanks for the rundown. Sounds like Ada has a lot of good ideas to steal!

Definitely! My C coding improved vastly after spending some time with Ada. Though it's worth keeping in mind that it's not only about each individual thing being good – it's also that they work really well together.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#197

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14

Is there a way to avoid the true-believer syndrome for Rust? I want to embrace Rust, but everyone ~100% of the time comes away chanting about how awesome Rust is. So much so that it's a bit unsettling. Zealotry in general is bad, but especially in programming: once you identify as an X programmer, you lose out on ideas from Y and Z. Every tool has its flaws, but for whatever reason it seems extremely rare to discuss…

[deleted]

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#198

Post by untog »

steveklabnik wrote: post #181
unethical_ban wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write somewhat simple programs and webapps for my job, from time to time. I use Python and its standard library, some modules, and the Bottle Framework. Pulling data from APIs, doing analysis, taking some user input, editing configs, etc. I hardly ever use classes unless I'm extending a vendor library. I have never used generics. Why are generics such a critical component of a programming language that every thread…

Here's a framing I found useful: as a user of a library, you may not particularly use generics. But as an implementor of a library, on the other hand, they're extremely useful. However, comparing to Python won't make much sense; people see generics as essential to statically typed langauges. You don't need them for dynamically typed ones!

> Here's a framing I found useful: as a user of a library, you may not particularly use generics. But as an implementor of a library, on the other hand, they're extremely useful.

Agreed. Something that's been underlined for me since picking up TypeScript in addition to JavaScript. I can take or leave TS when writing a script, but I consider it indispensable when writing a library.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#199

Post by dullgiulio »

smaddox wrote: post #184
unethical_ban wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write somewhat simple programs and webapps for my job, from time to time. I use Python and its standard library, some modules, and the Bottle Framework. Pulling data from APIs, doing analysis, taking some user input, editing configs, etc. I hardly ever use classes unless I'm extending a vendor library. I have never used generics. Why are generics such a critical component of a programming language that every thread…

In Python, duck typing provides the benefits of generics, minus the static guarantees. If you're using duck typing in python, then you should be able to understand why generics can be useful.

Go uses structural typing which feels like duck typing but it's actually checked at compile time.

That's the reason why the Go community feels generics are not the top priority (euphemism.)

Only in very specific cases (implementing data structures, for example) you can feel the need for generics. Maybe also in serialization, although that's really normal to pass a generic container (object, void *, interface{}) and use introspection.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#200

Post by dullgiulio »

mikojan wrote: post #152
josephg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go is another programming language I like, ... Fearless concurrency is a wonderful feature, but for embarrassingly parallel problems Go works wonderfully. I adore Go's concurrency model but loathe go's actual language. The constant repetition in error handling, lack of generics and lack of parameterised types and Option make it feel like a children's toy set version of C instead of a useful modern language akin to…

Kotlin has coroutines, channels and select.

They are a very fresh addition in a very fresh language. But they look pretty well implemented (explicitly designed after those of Go.)
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