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Rust is Software's Salvation

redox-os.org

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Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#31

Post by youdontknowtho »

Captain Obvious here with a public service announcement:

Rust's safety guarantees dont extend to logic or protocol implementation problems or misconfigured security settings.the part of the article about service providers leaking creds or other info...Rust all the things and that will still happen.

Some of this stuff is just too much. Also, why not work on lifetime and memory safety in a c based language? Rust looks like Klingon to me. functional-ish-ness is really hot right now. (Like Hansel.)

There's this really sophomoric theme that this seems to be a part of that keeps resurfacing here. its almost like a conspiracy of influences made the wrong tech choice in the past and everything would be ok now if we used X. Where X could be haskell, rust, os2, plan 9, lisp, lisp, lisp, go...theres quite a few saviors out there they resurface every now and again.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#33

Post by vvanders »

w8rbt wrote: post #16
rubiquity wrote: post #6

The amount of hype Rust is getting is not going to end well for Rust. This reminds me of Ruby during 2007-2010 where it went from Patron Saint to Scapegoat for every startup that failed using it. Ruby survived it, and I'm sure Rust will too, but that doesn't make it obnoxious for everyone else who inevitably gets swept up in the craze and crash. Programming is hard. Programming will always be hard. Better/newer tools…

I agree. C is fast because it can be unsafe. Skip all the safety checks and run like hell (if you need or want to). We don't care what size that array is, we just want to go really fast. Safety checks come with a performance cost. Rust claims to be faster than C and safer than C at the same time. That's not possible.

Performance comes from being cache aware and having control over allocations moreso than safety checks.

Maybe not faster than C but at least as fast while bringing modern patterns and better safety.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#34

Post by pjmlp »

jasode wrote: post #19
falcolas wrote: post #5

The best defense is a good offense. What is scaring all of the Rust developers and users so badly that they feel the need to go on such an offensive hype campaign? It's worse than the phase Java went through when it hit its peak. I'll be honest. Until we start seeing some more balanced (frankly, I'd settle for nuanced) discussion about the compromises made to get Rust's strengths, I'm staying the hell away from it.

>It's worse than the phase Java went through when it hit its peak. As a person who lived through the 1990s Java hype and had a bookshelf full of the official Java books (Addison-Wesley white books)[1], the Rust evangelism is nowhere near that level. To refresh the memory, 1990s Java evangelists predicted: 1) C/C++ would become obsolete because in the age of abundant desktop resources (cpu power and more RAM), the GC…

Many of those failures were more political than technical.

For example, the internal wars between Windows and DevTools divisions at MSFT, were the biggest reason for Longhorn's failure.

MSR with Midori has proven the viability of using C# for systems programming, when no politics are in play and everyone is focused on technical improvements.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#35

Post by EugeneOZ »

w8rbt wrote: post #16
rubiquity wrote: post #6

The amount of hype Rust is getting is not going to end well for Rust. This reminds me of Ruby during 2007-2010 where it went from Patron Saint to Scapegoat for every startup that failed using it. Ruby survived it, and I'm sure Rust will too, but that doesn't make it obnoxious for everyone else who inevitably gets swept up in the craze and crash. Programming is hard. Programming will always be hard. Better/newer tools…

I agree. C is fast because it can be unsafe. Skip all the safety checks and run like hell (if you need or want to). We don't care what size that array is, we just want to go really fast. Safety checks come with a performance cost. Rust claims to be faster than C and safer than C at the same time. That's not possible.

It's possible: http://2015.splashcon.org/event/splash2015-tutorials-concurr...

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#36

Post by jeffdavis »

rubiquity wrote: post #6

The amount of hype Rust is getting is not going to end well for Rust. This reminds me of Ruby during 2007-2010 where it went from Patron Saint to Scapegoat for every startup that failed using it. Ruby survived it, and I'm sure Rust will too, but that doesn't make it obnoxious for everyone else who inevitably gets swept up in the craze and crash. Programming is hard. Programming will always be hard. Better/newer tools…

Do you have any suggestion to maintain hype at a reasonable level? Basically, a lot of people are excited about it, a lot of people are writing good libraries, and they blog about them, which feeds into the hype cycle.

I think the main hype danger for rust right now is that the number of killer applications written it will fall short of the hype. But the linked article is from someone writing redox-os, so it's hard to criticize this article specifically for contributing to overhype.

Ruby had the opposite problem, which is that a lot of people were writing amazing applications, but it fell down technically (applications got messier and slower; or at least that is the perception). In theory the same thing could happen to rust, but it seems less likely.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#37

Post by ZenoArrow »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #18
ZenoArrow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Until we start seeing some more balanced (frankly, I'd settle for nuanced) discussion about the compromises made to get Rust's strengths, I'm staying the hell away from it." Look into the issues surrounding the borrow checker, that's one of Rust's main pain points. Long compilation times are another common issue. To Rust fans, I realise both of those issues will be addressed to some degree as MIR matures, but I'm l…

Could you please tell more about borrow checker issues?

http://softwaremaniacs.org/blog/2016/02/12/ownership-borrowi...

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#38

Post by azdle »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #18
ZenoArrow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Until we start seeing some more balanced (frankly, I'd settle for nuanced) discussion about the compromises made to get Rust's strengths, I'm staying the hell away from it." Look into the issues surrounding the borrow checker, that's one of Rust's main pain points. Long compilation times are another common issue. To Rust fans, I realise both of those issues will be addressed to some degree as MIR matures, but I'm l…

Could you please tell more about borrow checker issues?

I assume they're talking about the fact that basically everyone that learns Rust goes through a period of "fighting the borrow checker". Part of the way that rust ensures memory safety is by preventing you from doing things that it can't prove are safe to do. For people coming from languages like C or C++ they've been able to get away with doing things that are probably unsafe but that work either through luck or very careful planning. But since the borrow checker can't prove that some of these tricks are safe it will just say "no" and fail to compile.

Within a couple weeks you will get the hang of what the borrow checker can actually handle and you'll mostly not have problems except when you are actually making a genuine mistake.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#39

Post by spacelizard »

rubiquity wrote: post #6

The amount of hype Rust is getting is not going to end well for Rust. This reminds me of Ruby during 2007-2010 where it went from Patron Saint to Scapegoat for every startup that failed using it. Ruby survived it, and I'm sure Rust will too, but that doesn't make it obnoxious for everyone else who inevitably gets swept up in the craze and crash. Programming is hard. Programming will always be hard. Better/newer tools…

The echoes of Golang hype right now are somewhat ominous. A few years ago it was "concurrency primitives are going to change your life" and now it's "lifetime/ownership primitives are going to change your life."

I am somewhat disappointed that we still feel the need to create entirely new toolchains and rewrite everything just to support what should be an incremental improvement. But at a certain point, a lot of the reason for the hype is that it sells these solutions to newer developers that haven't had exposure to these concepts before. I suppose we can consider them fortunate for not having to do systems programming while suffering through implementing their own reference counting and garbage collection semantics.

Re: Rust is Software's Salvation

#40

Post by steveklabnik »

falcolas wrote: post #13
cbrewster wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why marketing Rust implies that the community is trying to defend it. Honestly, I enjoy sharing with my experience with Rust because I personally enjoy writing in code with Rust and want to share that with others! Nobody is saying Rust is perfect or doesn't have tradeoffs.

> Nobody is saying Rust is perfect Err, the title of this article is "Rust is Software's Salvation". The previous one was "Rust is mostly safety". No discussion of trade offs, no negatives to be found. From the original article: "[Rust is] Technology from the past come to save the future from itself" > Not sure why marketing Rust implies that the community is trying to defend it The original article was a call for ma…

> The original article was a call for marketing material, because they don't feel enough people are using it.

This is absolutely not true. I would love for Rust to have more users, but that's because I love Rust, and want to share that with people. But really, just like we try to make software better, I'm interested in how to make our pitch better.

You would think Hacker News, of all places, would understand that.

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