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I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

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Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#201

Post by lenkite »

estebank wrote: post #142

I find it surprising that so many people are arguing about the benefits and drawbacks of `?`, when in my experience the handling of Result and Option haven't been an issue in practice on the consuming side (`?`, `.unwrap()`, `.map()`, `.ok()`, if let, match, let chains, let else, etc. help a lot), but where all the pain comes from is having to declare the appropriate error type itself. Libraries like `anyhow` takes s…

All these workarounds for easier Result handling truly make me wonder whether Rust will eventually evolve exceptions as a feature - of-course without explicitly terming them so.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#202

Post by steveklabnik »

theptip wrote: post #149
hinkley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second mistake was only flirting with Bertrand Meyer’s work until the Gang of Four showed up and wrecked Java forever. Meyer + functional core nets you a great deal of code with no exception declarations and an easy path for unit tests. If it hurts to do stuff it might not be the language that sucks, it might be you. Pain is information. Adapt.

Don’t know Meyer’s work - any suggestions for good starting points?

Learn Eiffel. From their own explanation: https://www.eiffel.org/doc/eiffel/Learning_Eiffel

> Remember that Eiffel, unlike other programming languages, is not just a programming language. Instead, it is a full life-cycle framework for software development. As a consequence, learning Eiffel implies learning the Eiffel Method and the Eiffel programming Language. Additionally, the Eiffel development environment EiffelStudio is specifically designed to support the method and language. So having an understanding of the method and language helps you to appreciate the capabilities and behavior of EiffelStudio.

I read "Object-Oriented Software Construction" to do so, but it was long enough ago that I googled "The Eiffel Programming Language" because my brain had substituted that title instead because IMHO, it's more accurate.

The above link should have many current resources for you.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#203

Post by lenkite »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #197
Jensson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Java functions declares Exceptions in its type signature, so it does all of that automatically. Then you get a compile error if you don't handle it in the function, or you need to declare the function throws it, so it is type safe. Note that people now consider that as a mistake, people prefer having Exceptions be hidden instead of explicit and requiring handling like that.

> Note that people now consider that as a mistake, people prefer having Exceptions be hidden instead of explicit and requiring handling like that. What people? Please tell me where they’re at so I can tell them they are wrong (lol) But seriously, I could not disagree more.

The designers of the Java functional and stream library for one. None of the functional contracts have throws. So you are forced to have un-checked exceptions for everything, unless you want a truly mind-boggling amount of try-catch everywhere which will rapidly exceed your normal code by factor of 2x-3x.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#204

Post by marcosdumay »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I can't get it why people would prefer to add "?" to everything instead of just having exceptions which automate that behavior. In the bad old days of C there were two kinds of programs: programs without correct error handling, and programs where half the loc are unhappy paths that do what exceptions do... with a huge amount of work. Today people are repeating the same mistakes of the past, putting a "?" on everythin…

> It is like somebody showed cavemen fire (exceptions) and they decided it wasn't worth anything

Oh, it absolutely can not be that the Rust way is more powerful and you didn't understand it yet. No way. It's all those other people that don't understand the old concept that almost all of them know.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#205

Post by alfalfasprout »

throw14082020 wrote: post #94
richardwhiuk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree with Go vs Rust. I think if you would choose Java or Python or C#, then Rust might not be the right choice.

Go is in a sweet spot where it is often used to compete with both groups: [Rust, C/C++] and [Node, Python, Ruby, etc]. The reason GP said it is probably because of Garbage collection. I've done a bit of Rust in my job, and there are some basic things that Rust doesn't have going for it: - steep learning curve (this means for the first 6 months, you or your colleagues are unproductive, write bad Rust which your compan…

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to agree.

Rust lives in this interesting spot where, on paper, it should be superior to anything... but in practice, it's not a good choice in most cases.

It's very easy to ramp up someone in Go that's had a standard CS education and written C/C++ before. It's also simple enough syntax-wise for someone who knows python well enough to understand references, etc. Its stylistic restrictions and not being OOP-first also mean that codebases are generally readable. Compilation is also extremely straight forward.

With Rust, I've found even very experienced C++ folks have a long ramp-up period, the development toolchain is slow, and the ecosystem is limited.

Sure, for example there are projects to enable Rust usage with CUDA. But few are inclined to actually bother implementing a new BLAS and GPU accelerated tensor library with Rust.

I do think 10 years from now Rust will start getting more adoption as the ecosystem and tooling improve.

But it's hard to argue with Go where you'll typically get results that are faster or at worst comparable to Java without the OOP design pattern gobbledygook, simple concurrency model, and simple build process. It's "good enough" for 99% of use cases.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#206

Post by soggybutter »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #21

How much more performance do you need to get from Rust over Python (even Cython, PyPy, Numba, etc) to justify the extra development cost? A 2x gain is certainly not worth it. A 10x gain? Maybe. But that is hard to achieve when much of your "compute" is spent on the DB side of things. How many startups actually scale out of needing a few non-db instances?

My team helps run and deploy a python service that is entirely CPU bound. It accepts an input, performs some computation, and returns a result without any sort of I/O outside of the initiating HTTP request. In the past week it's averaged around 144 req/s with a p95 latency of ~1s.

We average ~80 "instances" to maintain this level of performance. I have very little doubt that, if given the opportunity to rewrite this in rust, we could smash 10x perf improvements. Could we also get more perf out of tuning our python code better? Definitely. Do I think there's 10-20x improvement waiting to be uncovered? No.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) we're at a stage that it makes more sense to throw ludicrous sums of money at it than it does to ground up rewrite.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#207

Post by dgb23 »

unshavedyak wrote: post #174
dgb23 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your code is still more likely to be faster than Node/Python, and potentially Go/C#/Java Python very likely, Node probably too, not sure. I doubt it's true for the others. My guess is you're going to use less resources (memory etc.) but you're not going to beat their runtimes with hand-rolled GC (ref counting) and allocations all over the place.

Really depends on what you're doing. The thing is if you know enough about why cloning is slow - like a really fat string or a tight loop - you probably also know enough to avoid that. At least in my experience. There's a ton of rope in Rust with lifetimes, generics, etc. Most if not all generic bounds have implications about the user and caller. Choosing which type of methods you use to avoid allocation while protot…

Right, I missed the broader point. When you choose to use Rust but need to advance quickly, you are going to be fine with some of these techniques.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#208

Post by sanderjd »

wvenable wrote: post #58
nemothekid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer having extra work done writing code (adding "?") than having to do extra work reading code. Exceptions are functionally invisible control flow; it isn't clear to the reader that a function may blow up if the exceptions are unhandled.

Assume all functions can throw and there is no extra work reading. A function that has no possibility of error is so uninteresting in the context of error handling. Furthermore, handling errors has little to do with where the error is actually caused. In general, you can only do two things with errors: log and kill the operation or retry the operation. Neither of these has anything to do with the leaf function 20 ite…

What you're describing here are unchecked exceptions, which Rust has in the form of panic. There are other kinds of errors that can be handled closer to the point where they occur.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#209

Post by wyager »

zeroxfe wrote: post #37

If you're thinking about building something in Rust, a good question to ask is, "what would I use if Rust didn't exist?" If your answer is something like Go or Node.js, then Rust is probably not the right choice. If your answer is C or C++ or something similar, then Rust is very likely the right choice. Obv, there are always exceptions here, but this helps you work through things a bit more objectively. Rust can be a…

Precisely. If you like what you see in Rust but you don't need to worry about extremely strict hardware/memory/realtime constraints (i.e. you could use a memory-managed language), consider Haskell instead.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#210

Post by afavour »

dcow wrote: post #162
throw14082020 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is in a sweet spot where it is often used to compete with both groups: [Rust, C/C++] and [Node, Python, Ruby, etc]. The reason GP said it is probably because of Garbage collection. I've done a bit of Rust in my job, and there are some basic things that Rust doesn't have going for it: - steep learning curve (this means for the first 6 months, you or your colleagues are unproductive, write bad Rust which your compan…

> - Verbose. I've seen a just few lines of JS get replaced with hundreds and thousands of Rust. Please, more detail (=

JS:

    new HTMLDivElement()
Rust:

    struct WebBrowser {
    ...
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