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Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#201

Post by computerphage »

eridius wrote: post #54
xiphias wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is the first language since C++ that can improve/not hinder runtime speed while making development safer, so I definately see its future. The only problem is that the compiler is very slow now, so it doesn't scale to large code bases, which is a no-go in my company. Hopefully the Rust team understands that this is not only a would-be-nice to have feature (I see learning the borrow checker as a smaller problem)

I believe incremental compilation is already being worked on, which should speed up your compiles (well, the first compile would be slow, but subsequent compiles would be faster).

A limited form of incremental compilation is already available on nightly. And yes, more is coming.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#202

Post by whyever »

mmstick wrote: post #178
neandrake wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's nostalgia for pre-Web 2.0 designs but I love your website; it has character and feels personal compared to most pages I peruse.

Thanks. I've never built a website before, but now I've built a website, and a web server + cms client at the same time. I've been thinking of open sourcing the code at some point in the future. The website stores all the content in a database, uses handlebar templates to generate HTML pages, stores the generated HTML pages in a concurrent hash map compressed with the native Rust implementation of Zopfli, and only re…

Couldn't you just gzip the HTML and serve it directly to the browser?

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#203

Post by lfairy »

pcwalton wrote: post #53
stmfd wrote: post #7

I think it has a fair chance (Go is a "systems" language and grew very quickly). I also believe you'll see it pop up in unikernels as well. Why, you ask? Because there's always 1 person that starts a project that gets traction. I don't see it growing and replacing C++ though. I don't think there's much incentive post C++11 to really consider porting anything (even small things) over. Most of the features Rust gets pr…

> (1) Ridiculous - if you need segfault protection, you're a bad programmer. Let's be honest, you don't segfault unless you're doing something idiotic. I've not segfaulted in the past 8 years in anything but assembly. So let me get this straight. Is your position that Google's Chrome developers (just to name one project) are idiots? You can't hold your opinion without believing that Google, and in fact pretty much ev…

For the uninitiated: Google dedicates a whole cluster of machines to finding memory safety bugs in Chrome. Finding segfaults is part of their work flow.

https://dev.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/bugs/using-c...

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#204

Post by lokedhs »

hyperpape wrote: post #182
soulbadguy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using exceptions would be unprofessional. Unless it happens to be the best tools for the particular scenario... > then all of my carefully crafted error-handling routines would go up in flames No just sandbox the code inside a try catch... > pattern matching is the best method of clearly displaying intents and possible downfalls. You are stating an opinions as a fact here.

> No just sandbox the code inside a try catch... This works fine if it's just a matter of rolling back a database transaction or releasing file handles (b/c someone else is doing all the work for you). But if you have more complicated invariants, your try catch has to handle restoring those invariants, no matter what path your code took.

I'd recommend taking a look at Common Lisps condition system, which does exceptions right.

The most important feature is that catch blocks are executed before the stack is unwond, providing the ability for a handler to signal back to the context where the error occurred how it should be handled.

It's sad that no other languages implement this and instead simply decide that exceptions are bad.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#205

Post by [deleted] »

mmstick wrote: post #178
neandrake wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's nostalgia for pre-Web 2.0 designs but I love your website; it has character and feels personal compared to most pages I peruse.

Thanks. I've never built a website before, but now I've built a website, and a web server + cms client at the same time. I've been thinking of open sourcing the code at some point in the future. The website stores all the content in a database, uses handlebar templates to generate HTML pages, stores the generated HTML pages in a concurrent hash map compressed with the native Rust implementation of Zopfli, and only re…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#206

Post by whyever »

daenney wrote: post #26
Cshelton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

That's 60 companies. Granted there's bound to be a few more but calling it "pretty mainstream" based on that seems like a stretch to me. Though not a flawless datapoint I'd rather use something like the TIOBE[1] index, which puts Rust at 0,37% rating, or position 41, right below Erlang. I hope that'll change, I think Rust has some interesting concepts and could be a notable step forward for some things that we've alw…

Rust fares better in other indices.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#207

Post by whyever »

kazagistar wrote: post #118
kazinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you might care is that if you build something today, that something could reap some benefit in the future from the language becoming "mainstream". Possible benefits: * users not going "gack, this is written in an obscure language that we have to install to build it". * the implementation quality being better: the thing I write now will benefit from the language being less of a moving target and with fewer bugs, b…

For point one, it helps that Rust is one of the easiest languages I have ever worked with to install the compiler run-time, pull dependencies, build, run, and distribute. So at the very least, it won't get in your way if you just want to distribute a static binary, or give your users a few commands to compile it themselves, even if it is "some weird language". On point two, Rust is not a moving target, in the sense t…

Unfortunately Rust uses an LLVM fork IIRC, so using it is non-trivial.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#208

Post by 46Bit »

tmccrmck wrote: post #161
flukus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If rust ever gets to the point where it's not much harder to write than java/c# then why not got for the fastest one and avoid performance death by a thousand cuts? A millisecond here and there can add up. And then there's the environmental cost of slower code. How many tonnes of CO2 emissions are higher level languages responsible for daily?

> If rust ever gets to the point where it's not much harder to write than java/c# then why not got for the fastest one and avoid performance death by a thousand cuts? Sure. If it's just as easy for the task then why not? But I wouldn't recommend Rust for web development for the same reason I wouldn't recommend C++ for web dev: complexity. Obviously, this is entirely subjective but I don't think either language will e…

> I used to TA a freshman data structures class. I can't imagine ever going to a class of new programmers and trying to explain to them when to use Rc>> vs. Rc>>.

I'm interested - how do you teach it? I would have thought that the type system could make these things easier to visualise rather than harder, but then I don't have teaching experience.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#209

Post by lossolo »

mmstick wrote: post #180
lossolo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean hobbyist ? All the AAA games are still written in C++, none of the big studios is even considering to switch. Rust type system/restrictions would get into the way more than it would help in AAA game dev. Memory safety is not a problem in game development, they will just patch the bugs. Studios have whole ecosystems written in C++ that works for them. Benefits are really low compared to costs, that's why it's…

Type restrictions aren't really a problem, but in fact really helps out game development in the long run. > Memory safety is not a problem in game development, they will just patch the bugs. You must not have played any Bethesda titles. That said, there is much more to Rust than memory safety. That's just a side effect of the safe parallelism -- it's a minor story.

> Type restrictions aren't really a problem

Did you ever seen AAA game source code?

> You must not have played any Bethesda titles.

I've played. Most bugs I've seen were logic errors, doesn't matter which language you would pick.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust ever become a mainstream systems programming language?

#210

Post by burntsushi »

flukus wrote: post #158
burntsushi wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are shipping ripgrep with VS code.

But shipping a program using rust != using rust. If that was the case I've used Erlang despite never having written a single line of it because I've shipped rabbitmq.

This is a strange argument I find myself in. What do you expect me to say? They're shipping a Rust application I wrote. That's a fact. Do with it what you will.
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