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What is Rust and why is it so popular?

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Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#241

Post by zozbot234 »

pron wrote: post #235
Rusky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how Zig comptime is any simpler than Rust. Frankly, it seems more of a kluge. But we've already been over this before. :)

A single construct does the work, or most of the work, of generics, value generics, const fn, traits, attributes (although I expect some form of attributes might be added to Zig) and macros, and it does so without type-level programming or macro-level programming, both their own mini-languages. A kludge is in the eye of the beholder, but one is simpler than five or six.

Rust has procedural macros too. And they're not a separate "mini-language" like the C++ template hacks, they just use Rust itself, except with a phase separation involved since they run at compile time.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#242

Post by pjmlp »

orclev wrote: post #104
pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who never much got into systems programming, Rust is a breath of fresh air. I think that's part of the problem :) Because Rust looks high level it appeals to people used to high-level programming. But once you get into systems programming, the issues are different from high-level programming, and you're less happy to pay for features that solve other problems. What I'm saying is, obviously, a matter of t…

Part of the problem is that "systems programming" is an overloaded term that means a number of different things. Is writing a web browser "systems programming"? What about a CLI utility like grep? Kernel module? Bare metal on a STM32? Depending on who you ask most of those will get both a yes and a no answer. On a related note, some language are more or less suitable for each of those. Can you write an OS in Java? Ye…

> Can you write an OS in Java? Yes. Should you? Probably not.

PTC, Aicas and Gemalto embedded JVMs for industrial automation can run either with a real time OS, or directly bare metal with Java Real Time JSR.

Android has plenty of Java in it, as of Project Treble it is possible to write user space drivers in Java, something that Android Things supported since the beginning.

MicroEJ has a minimal hardware glue in C, with everything else in Java.

At CCC there was a demo about TamaGo, bare metal Go for USB security devices, then there is also Astrobe with Oberon-07, the new Meadow boards run .NET Standard based OS.

Arduino and ESP 32 support Circuit Python, uLisp, MicroScheme and picoOCaml.

So plenty of systems programming examples with GC.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#243

Post by Rusky »

pron wrote: post #235
Rusky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how Zig comptime is any simpler than Rust. Frankly, it seems more of a kluge. But we've already been over this before. :)

A single construct does the work, or most of the work, of generics, value generics, const fn, traits, attributes (although I expect some form of attributes might be added to Zig) and macros, and it does so without type-level programming or macro-level programming, both their own mini-languages. A kludge is in the eye of the beholder, but one is simpler than five or six.

That's hardly an honest comparison. I can just as easily split comptime into "type comptime," "value comptime," "comptime blocks," "builtin functions like @isInteger," and "inline control structures" (that one doesn't even use the "comptime" name!).

Arguably this combination is more complex than Rust's. It has no way to constrain a comptime type argument (traits), so you get error messages like C++ templates. It has no way to constrain a function to be comptime-compatible (const fn), so you get more error messages like C++ templates. When you want to combine things, you manage phase ordering and idioms by hand, basically re-implementing Rust-like concepts at every use site.

Sometimes one or two more concepts in the language makes things simpler. To use a subject you've discussed before, it's similar to scoped continuations vs full call/cc.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#244

Post by pjmlp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #241
pron wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single construct does the work, or most of the work, of generics, value generics, const fn, traits, attributes (although I expect some form of attributes might be added to Zig) and macros, and it does so without type-level programming or macro-level programming, both their own mini-languages. A kludge is in the eye of the beholder, but one is simpler than five or six.

Rust has procedural macros too. And they're not a separate "mini-language" like the C++ template hacks, they just use Rust itself, except with a phase separation involved since they run at compile time.

In C++17 and moreso in C++20, doing C++ template hacks is only excusable for legacy code, or trying to make code portable to older compilers.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#245

Post by zozbot234 »

lostdog wrote: post #194
alxlaz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly a hunch, based on a combination of lots and lots of factors. It's very difficult to explain. From a distance, "embedded" looks like a very homogenous field, but it's nothing like that. Some of the factors that contribute to this hunch -- but bear in mind that they don't apply everywhere in the embedded development space, nor equally, nor to every kind of device -- include: 1. A lot of resource-constrained…

Very interesting breakdown. Do you think that Rust could instead help outsourcing? Similar to how Java's GC keeps teams away from segfaults, could Rust's safety guarantees give companies more confidence that an outsourced team's code would have fewer critical bugs?

Java doesn't keep teams away from NullPointerException, ConcurrentModificationException and CrossCastException - Rust does. But then, think of the amount of serious bugs and design flaws that typical Java/.NET outsourced code has, even after the former have been scrubbed away from a codebase. Let's just say that I'm far from optimistic that Rust alone could be the silver bullet that makes outsourcing work.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#246

Post by dorfsmay »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
dorfsmay wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt that we'll see it used for low-power/resource-constrained firmware I'm curious what your reasoning is for saying this?

Are you going to use Rust on a PIC12 with 32 bytes of data memory and max 256 code instructions? Of course not. Assembly is still king in this low-powered embedded class and will stay as such for the foreseeable future.

I interpreted alxlaz' comment as Rust vs C (or other high level language, C+" etc...), which his answer to my question seem to indicate that was the case, as he gives more reason for Rust likely not to be adopted on some platforms.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#247

Post by jhayward »

steveklabnik wrote: post #205
janered wrote: post #190

Still not hyped. The article does not show anything special or new about the language that would attract me personally. Type inference -- nothing new and exists in many other languages. Actually how about compile type inference not only in function bodies? :) Functional niceness with iterators -- also nothing new. It can be even more succinct and elegant in Scala for example. But Scala is not as fast you'd say! Yeah,…

> Actually how about compile type inference not only in function bodies? This is actually an explicit design decision; it means that the analysis is tractable, and that you don't get spooky-at-a-distance error messages.

It's a major detractor, especially for people new to Rust.

The number of times I see people recommend "just cut and paste in whatever type the compiler said it expected ..." just makes my hair curl.

It also tends to make the code more obscure and unreadable, sometimes completely so.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#248

Post by qaq »

jane_red wrote: post #231
qaq wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My claim was that it is nothing out-of-ordinary". Well I guess will agree to disagree there are pretty prominent cases of very capable people trying to do a project in C++ and failing and then leveraging Rust and actually delivering.

And it would be great to read about such projects. But I have not heard about such. Maybe I would change my opinion.

Mozilla namely: "By 2017, Mozilla had made two previous attempts to parallelize the style system using C++. Both had failed." but they were able to complete it in Rust.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#249

Post by zozbot234 »

sdegutis wrote: post #188
shepmaster wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it’s new in the same way Haskell is new to a Java dev Do you have any hypotheses about why we don't see as much publicity for Haskell then?

Hey nice to see you here, your SO posts have tremendously helped me learn Rust. I think Haskell is just too abstract for most of us. I love Rust traits and see how it directly came from Haskell but I couldn’t learn Haskell even after like 3 serious tries. Maybe a good portion of the problem is in the documentation and not the language? That said, the extremist purity is simply impractical compared to Rust which gets…

Haskell is easier to learn than Rust because it's literally just math. There is no "dropping" variables and no need to side-step the lack of GC, because you never "drop" a variable that you've stopped using in a math proof. You just let the GC deal with all that stuff. And you don't have a "stack" vs. "heap" distinction, instead you work directly in terms of function arguments and the returned values. You have currying so you can work naturally with parameterized and partially-applied functions, just like in math, etc. Lazy evaluation for "infinite" sequences and objects. That kind of stuff.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#250

Post by zozbot234 »

clktmr wrote: post #209

As an embedded systems engineer I have very mixed feelings about Rust. There are a lot of things to like, but Rust seems to miss the point why C++ didn't replace C and will fail at that for the same reasons. I wish for an economic, unexciting, conservative evolution of C, which I don't see in Rust. I could imagine C++ being replaced by Rust, though I don't think borrow checking is the future of programming. Another p…

> I wish for an economic, unexciting, conservative evolution of C

That's not a bad description of Cyclone, Rust's direct predecessor. It went nowhere because it was so "conservative" over C as to be deeply unintuitive, and it lacked features that matter to modern programming. Rust is nonetheless far less complex than C++, and that in itself makes it a plausible C replacement.

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