Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I went about learning Rust

eli.thegreenplace.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 303 posts

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#21

Post by masklinn »

tofuahdude wrote: post #18
mihaigalos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you looking for in the 2 languages? Here are some of my thoughts: Golang * Development speed: Golang wins by far. It's closer to Python in that regard, but with strong typing. * Very nice multi-threading via Go routines and channels. Impressive semantics in simple syntax, requiring no synchronization mechanism on the user side. * Large garbage collector penalty. Rust * Complete language with build system, cr…

How "large" is the garbage collector penalty? My understanding is that the Go GC is significantly more efficient than for example JS's mark/sweep approach. Apples to oranges for sure, but I am interested in better understanding how expensive the Go GC is vs Rust performance.

Go’s GC is not efficient, it is responsive. That is, it trades throughput (and performances, and efficiency) for small pauses and concurrency.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#22

Post by nbittich »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

I think rust is the new haskell. After spending 7 months learning it, I can say I really enjoy the language, but there's no job in it and in my opinion, they take academic decisions that make the language way more complex than it should. Also, the community is toxic.

For example, generics in Go were criticized by some, praised by others.

You have the feeling that you can freely share your opinion in the go community without the risk of being harassed by the rest of the community.

In the rust community, just like a sect, everybody must say that everything is just perfect.

Passive / aggressive attitude is something I've seen a lot in the rust community.

I would suggest that if your plan is to learn C/C++ next, and you never really understood memory issues && pointers, then rust is a perfect choice at first.

I'm planning to learn Go next, I don't regret learning rust, I learned lots of things with it.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#23

Post by masklinn »

pjmlp wrote: post #11
masklinn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go does compile to wasm, however because wasm is what it is it has to carry around the entire runtime. This is obviously a much bigger issue for delivery over the web than it is for shuffling binaries around, or even more so creating them locally: last I’d checked, the baseline (an empty main function) for a go wasm package is about 1.3M.

Hardly an issue when looking at the ads crap that get download in every "modern" site.

Sure if your use case for go wasm is ads crap knock yourself out.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#24

Post by pjmlp »

masklinn wrote: post #23
pjmlp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly an issue when looking at the ads crap that get download in every "modern" site.

Sure if your use case for go wasm is ads crap knock yourself out.

That wasn't my point, ads and SPA crap available almost in every "modern" site, are several MB bigger in size than Go runtime on WASM.

Ergo a a WASM Go application will be much smaller than those "modern" sites.

I bet even smaller than GMail and Google Docs.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#25

Post by smt88 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #17

“How” is the stupidest word to auto-censor. Removing it completely changes the meaning of titles. It makes articles seem vapid or banal when they wouldn’t otherwise, and vice versa.

In this case, it changes the title so much that it's not correct English anymore.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#26

Post by mihaigalos »

tofuahdude wrote: post #18
mihaigalos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you looking for in the 2 languages? Here are some of my thoughts: Golang * Development speed: Golang wins by far. It's closer to Python in that regard, but with strong typing. * Very nice multi-threading via Go routines and channels. Impressive semantics in simple syntax, requiring no synchronization mechanism on the user side. * Large garbage collector penalty. Rust * Complete language with build system, cr…

How "large" is the garbage collector penalty? My understanding is that the Go GC is significantly more efficient than for example JS's mark/sweep approach. Apples to oranges for sure, but I am interested in better understanding how expensive the Go GC is vs Rust performance.

Check out the discord article I posted in the original reply.

If I interpret the graphs correctly, I see:

Golang:

* baseline 20% cpu + spikes to 35% once the GC runs.

* response times of about 1ms + spikes up to 10ms.

Rust:

* baseline 12% cpu + flat, no spiking.

* response times of 20us + flat, no spiking (!).

In terms of scaling, I interpret the results in favor of Rust.

My reasoning is the more you run the GC, the bigger the penalty.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#27

Post by formerly_proven »

nbittich wrote: post #22
xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

I think rust is the new haskell. After spending 7 months learning it, I can say I really enjoy the language, but there's no job in it and in my opinion, they take academic decisions that make the language way more complex than it should. Also, the community is toxic. For example, generics in Go were criticized by some, praised by others. You have the feeling that you can freely share your opinion in the go community…

> Also, the community is toxic.

The Rust community has been the friendliest PL community I've seen so far.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#28

Post by zozbot234 »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

Since you're coming from a NodeJS background, you'll want to pick up an introductory textbook about C as well. Rust implicitly relies quite closely on the C machine model, and introductory books about Rust (such as "The Rust Programming Language") don't do a very good job of conveying the nitty-gritty details of that model to novice coders. This is a pretty nasty pitfall when trying to code in Rust, and it's important to address it early.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#29

Post by tofuahdude »

mihaigalos wrote: post #26
tofuahdude wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How "large" is the garbage collector penalty? My understanding is that the Go GC is significantly more efficient than for example JS's mark/sweep approach. Apples to oranges for sure, but I am interested in better understanding how expensive the Go GC is vs Rust performance.

Check out the discord article I posted in the original reply. If I interpret the graphs correctly, I see: Golang: * baseline 20% cpu + spikes to 35% once the GC runs. * response times of about 1ms + spikes up to 10ms. Rust: * baseline 12% cpu + flat, no spiking. * response times of 20us + flat, no spiking (!). In terms of scaling, I interpret the results in favor of Rust. My reasoning is the more you run the GC, the…

Just read that article; very informative.

The TLDR is that, especially during GC, P99s and response times are notably worse in Go than Rust. Makes sense.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#30

Post by ActorNightly »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

Learning Rust is a good exercise in understanding memory safety. Learning it will make you understand the gotchas of what can go wrong with memory allocation, which will translate very well to coding in other languages, especially C.

Just like learning Haskel is a good exercise in understanding functional programming and lazy evaluation, which again will translate very well to the code you write as you will be able to identify pattens where functional programming can be applied.

However, neither language is really super applicable to general development, because there are hoops you have to jump through to write basic code where the language advantages are not really need, and other languages are much simpler and faster to develop in.

Golang is much more widely used for this reason, as its compiled yet features a gc, simpler to develop in with java contains a lot of good functionality in its stdlib.

Post reply on HN