Tell HN: Rust is the superglue • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#31

Post by smabie » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #18

First. I love F#. But it didn't take off in the market, so I'm learning Rust. What I tend to see is that Rust does have a higher learning curve, because you have to change your brain's way of approaching problems. The 'functional' way of viewing things. (plenty of past flame wars on functional programming, so not trying to start that here) Once you do learn Rust (or functional), it is safer, better, faster. But if yo…

Rust isn't really a functional language at all? It's pretty much just an imperative language with some type level features.

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#32

Post by smabie » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

charlieyu1 wrote: post #12

bionhoward wrote: post #8

Rust is awesome and could replace both JS and PY at exactly what they’re supposedly good at. The main issue is compatibility and library availability.

Not a professional, just wrote some Python. I definitely find Rust difficult to learn. Mutability, variable borrowing, variable lifecycles etc, do I really need this? Personally I only want to learn another language rather than Python for performance issues, and C++ is far easier and a lot more intuitive.

Rust is a lot easier to learn than C++.

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#33

Post by sn9 » Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #31

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #18

First. I love F#. But it didn't take off in the market, so I'm learning Rust. What I tend to see is that Rust does have a higher learning curve, because you have to change your brain's way of approaching problems. The 'functional' way of viewing things. (plenty of past flame wars on functional programming, so not trying to start that here) Once you do learn Rust (or functional), it is safer, better, faster. But if yo…

Rust isn't really a functional language at all? It's pretty much just an imperative language with some type level features.

Rust has strong functional influences [0] to the point of often being described as an ML with a C-like syntax and manual memory management instead of GC.

Like Haskell [1], writing in a higher level style can give the compiler enough information to get you non-trivial performance gains [2].

It's not just an imperative language. It's multi-paradigm and can be written in a more functional style.

You can just look at the ML family of languages and see which features Rust has that C/Java/Python don't.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch13-00-functional-features.h...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35027952/why-is-haskell-...

[2] https://ipthomas.com/blog/2023/07/n-times-faster-than-c-wher...

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#34

Post by jmspring » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 2:33 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #4

Just FYI, the market for C++ is excellent and has been for years, but I've yet to receive any well paid Rust project offer. My impression is that most people working with Rust are idealists (and not businesspeople) and the salaries reflect that.

C++ consulting or actual full time jobs?

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#35

Post by solomatov » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 12:22 PM UTC

IMO, it's a replacement for C/C++ with higher safety guarantees. Of course it's more suitable for ML, and Web, than C/C++, but if there're no hard perf requirements, there're better options.

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#36

Post by nateb2022 » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

bjornasm wrote: post #27

constantcrying wrote: post #23

Rust seems monumentally unsuited as a glue language like Perl or Bash. It is statically typed, compiled, makes strong assumption about the code, is relatively hard to write/learn and somewhat verbose. Rusts reason for existence and main goal is replacing C++. >For machine learning, we have the Py ecosystem A very bad state of affairs to be sure and also not really true as python is just a thin layer ontop of the actu…

>python is just a thin layer ontop of the actual code running the networks, which are written in C++ or loaded of to GPUs. Or Rust which is under libraries such as Polars. In other words: python is the glue in the data science world.

Indeed. Python is the high-level glue that connects the low-level stuff. When you import tensorflow, for instance, you deal with simplified abstractions and don't have to think about all the low-level optimizations that are taken care of by C/C++/Rust.

Rust is not the glue. It is a building block.

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#37

Post by nateb2022 » Sun, Jul 16, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #30

fxtentacle wrote: post #4

Just FYI, the market for C++ is excellent and has been for years, but I've yet to receive any well paid Rust project offer. My impression is that most people working with Rust are idealists (and not businesspeople) and the salaries reflect that.

Rust is pretty popular among crypto trading firms and those tend to pay very well.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most crypto trading firms (which aren't ponzi schemes in some form) pay well because they are usually short (<10 year) lived enterprises that receive a lot of initial hype before receding into the background after rewarding the entrepreneurs with above-average compensation plans? As far as I know, most such companies fail shortly after they run out of venture capital

Re: Tell HN: Rust is the superglue

#38

Post by ThePhysicist » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 10:07 AM UTC

I think Python is probably way better suited to be the superglue you mention, and in many areas it already serves that function. Many Python libraries are high-level bindings for low-level C/C++/Fortran (or recently, Rust) libraries. Examples are numpy, scipy, tensorflow, PyQt, ....

Rust is great in the sense that it is very suitable for being embedded into other software as it doesn't have a runtime system (like e.g. Golang) and can be compiled for almost any architecture. Rust's usability for "regular" programmers and technical users is horrible in my opinion. I e.g. worked with scientists a lot (and was one myself) and in my lab everyone could wrap their head around Python in a couple of days and become productive very fast, whereas most people would throw in the towel when they had to write low-level code in C/C++. In terms of learning curve and complexity I would put Rust somewhere in the same ballpark with C++. There are many differences and Rust has a much better developer experience as it has a modern package manager and the toolchain is much nicer, but it's still a low-level language with many intricacies.