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I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

gavinhoward.com

21–30 of 195 posts

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#21
post #7

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself: - Backends: Gleam or other BEAM - Web frontend: Gleam - Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter - Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin - Blazing fast: Zig - Blazing fast and safest: Rust - Fast performance and iteration: Go Would love to hear additions and corrections. My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I…

OCaml could almost replace all of those. I don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet. I’m not very experienced with BEAM, but could its features be delivered with a framework on top of a different stack? I know Akka is popular.

>>> don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet

I think there's something close - https://caramel.run/manual/

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#22

Projects adopting rust makes contributing less fun and more painful I tried to work on bug fix for Zed, waiting 30 seconds everytime you change a value was _very_ painful

At least, compiling is always straightforward. With C, there's a good chance the build will fail for whatever reason (e.g. your OS missing some header files).

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#23

Projects adopting rust makes contributing less fun and more painful I tried to work on bug fix for Zed, waiting 30 seconds everytime you change a value was _very_ painful

There’s no reason you couldn’t have a rust jit for development then compile the code for production (or stick with a jit for prod too).

Honestly it would probably be even faster than unoptimized aot compolation

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#24
My personal take on this subject is that Rust turns experts back into beginners and some devs react with hatred because of the fear this induces. For me it was the opposite. I was getting bored with my industry and thinking of a move to something else like management. Rust came along 6 yeas ago (for me) and threw me a lifeline. I love getting good at something that is hard, it’s just very satisfying. I do get why some people can’t stand the language. It is ugly to look at with its genetics and lifetime annotations and when a project is so large that it begins to lag rust-analyser then my joy turns to rage too.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#25
post #7

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself: - Backends: Gleam or other BEAM - Web frontend: Gleam - Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter - Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin - Blazing fast: Zig - Blazing fast and safest: Rust - Fast performance and iteration: Go Would love to hear additions and corrections. My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I…

I’m super into elixir now and don’t see myself going anywhere else. Is gleam really that good? What are the advantages? Can I use liveview with it?

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#26

Rust is certainly not the last word in systems programming languages, but it's an huge leap forward from C and C++. To be honest, it's a sad reflection of our industry that it's taken this long to get basic safety + ML circa 1975 language features into this niche. If things had turned out a little bit different we could all have been using OCaml for the past few decades.

My favorite hypothesis here is that programming language enthusiasts are too different. They are incapable of convincing the average programmer of the merits of their favorite language, because their way of thinking is different. Arguments they find convincing are not convincing to the average programmer.

Progress happens incrementally with small steps. Existing languages get new features. New languages get popular, because they look familiar but contain some small meaningful improvements. And familiarity is important. Languages like OCaml never become popular, because they are too different. Even the syntax looks unfamiliar.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#27
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readable would be a nice benefit.

This, I don't understand why we have to load these languages up with so much syntax, it's mind boggling to think that some how we feel it's beneficial to have so much. I'm admittedly biased to the symbolic expression but surely we could have come up with some middle ground.

Two things:

- It was made to be approachable for C++ experts

- The idea was that language could be effortlessly greppable.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#28
The post is a bit of a rant and all over the place. Async infecting everything, ugly syntax (who cares?), slow compile times etc.

What stood out to me:

> In other words, if compilation is fast, the tooling is easy.

Andrew Kelley said something similar in a recent talk. Compiler performance seems to be the number one priority at the moment for Zig.

The rationale seems to be: fast compilation leads to more productivity, which leads to more bugfixes.

This claim seems almost bruteish, but it makes sense.

Tight feedback loops (think things like devops, REPL, TDD, light processes etc.) can help us to iterate more and stay in the zone.

To be fair a sophisticated type checker like Rust‘s also helps with that.

But of course any added friction and sluggishness can be an indirect hindrance to the overall correctness and even performance of a program.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#29
post #7

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself: - Backends: Gleam or other BEAM - Web frontend: Gleam - Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter - Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin - Blazing fast: Zig - Blazing fast and safest: Rust - Fast performance and iteration: Go Would love to hear additions and corrections. My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I…

OCaml could almost replace all of those. I don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet. I’m not very experienced with BEAM, but could its features be delivered with a framework on top of a different stack? I know Akka is popular.

GC precludes OCaml from replacing a chunk of those.

Re: I Hope Rust Does Not Oxidize Everything

#30
post #7

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself: - Backends: Gleam or other BEAM - Web frontend: Gleam - Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter - Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin - Blazing fast: Zig - Blazing fast and safest: Rust - Fast performance and iteration: Go Would love to hear additions and corrections. My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I…

OCaml could almost replace all of those. I don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet. I’m not very experienced with BEAM, but could its features be delivered with a framework on top of a different stack? I know Akka is popular.

Actor model is a small component of the BEAM. Even then, it guarantees yields to the scheduler.

This is practically impossible to retrofit on to an existing language, esp. in the presence of loops.

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