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Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

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Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#311

Post by jstx1 »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #275

Is rusts most loved status simply Stockholm syndrome? I've really tried with rust, and we simply don't get on. I hear all the arguments about CVEs and wonder if rust will reduce the number of these problems simply by disabling the programmers that create them. I understand the draw, I want to love it, but i think I might not be smart enough.

No, it's a selection effect. The stackoverflow most loved metric is

    people_who_want_to_keep_using_the_language / people_who_have_used_it_in_the_past_year
Since Rust is so early in its adoption and there are few jobs, many of the responders are hobbyists who are into Rust, like it and want to keep using; not necessarily people who use it for work. And since you only take into account the people who have used it in the past year, you ignore all the people who have tried Rust before that and didn't like it.

As an extreme example, let's say I created a language in 2020, the entire software community tried it and they absolutely hated it and unanimously rejected it as the worst language ever but it still has 2 users (my mom and I) who want to keep using it - that languages would score 100% Most Loved on stackoverflow's survey even though it was hated by the overwhelming majority of people who tried it.

With this formulation you create the strange effect that if people hate a language enough to stop using it, the language's most loved metric goes up after a year.

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#312

Post by bitmapper »

lelanthran wrote: post #285
HacklesRaised wrote: post #275

Is rusts most loved status simply Stockholm syndrome? I've really tried with rust, and we simply don't get on. I hear all the arguments about CVEs and wonder if rust will reduce the number of these problems simply by disabling the programmers that create them. I understand the draw, I want to love it, but i think I might not be smart enough.

It's a language designed by people who's favourite language is not even pronounceable. Did you think that such a group of people, who place their love for the language above practical things like readability, would come up with a new language that cared about the user-experience[1]? As we see all the time WRT to programming languages, readability is more important than the more abstract stuff. > I hear all the argume…

I personally don't like Rust (I like to have a garbage collector for what I do), but I don't think it's a hard to read language.

Readability is an incredibly subjective thing. For example, APL might look like an absolute mess to most people but to the people who know it, it's incredibly easy to read. All "readability" means in this context is that it's familiar to you.

In my opinion, the only truly hard to read languages are languages that require you to keep large amounts of context in memory while reading a specific part of the codebase, be it due to lack of support for abstractions for proper encapsulation, messy overloading, insane inheritance hierarchies, or something else.

EDIT: Readability also requires you have a codebase that's well written, and even that's subjective.

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#313

Post by pjmlp »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66
Animats wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can avoid async I would recommend doing so. The problem is that the entire ecosystem has completely shifted to async. There are almost no active / popular libraries related to network IO that haven't switched over. Yes. I've been complaining about async contamination for some time. I'm writing heavily threaded code, with threads running at different priorities, and libraries which want async get in the way.…

I agree, I don't understand why so many people lately seem to want to use Rust for web domain stuff. I don't like Go, I hated the year I had to work in it @ Google. But frankly, it's better suited for 'server' type stuff, unless you're talking about a very specific type of server that has super intense latency guarantees. And now that Go has generics, I'd probably hate it less. Go is the new Java. Rust is the new C++…

> Go is the new Java.

I hope not, it might have some generics now, but still has a lot to catch up with.

I surely don't miss coding in Java 5 (2004).

> Rust is the new C++

Rust might become the new C++, and while being safe by default is great, there are plenty of C++ use cases where Rust has zero presence in 2022.

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#314

Post by [deleted] »

olalonde wrote: post #281
AndrewGaspar wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I think we need a high-level, no-BS version of Rust. F# is probably what you're looking for if you want functional-lite programming with a strong type system, but don't want to deal with the pains caused by static resource management.

It might sound superficial but the simple fact that there is seemingly a hard dependency[0] on Visual Studio (Code) is a major turnoff for me. I am quite attached to my Vim/command line workflow. [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/get-started/i...

[deleted]

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#315

Post by gspr »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #302
gspr wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm quite fad-resistant (others would use less positive words to describe the same attribute). I still find Rust truly excellent, and the most joy I've had programming since Haskell (while at the same time being a lot more mainstream and pragmatic choice for collaborative projects than Haskell).

My wife calls my stubborness 'Cultural Stamina', I think it's an excellent phrase that always raises a smile. I really enjoyed Haskell when I tried it years ago (2004) and I definitely agree that Rust is much more apropos to the mainstream.

> Cultural Stamina

Love it!

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#316

Post by pjmlp »

conradludgate wrote: post #299
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I don't understand why so many people lately seem to want to use Rust for web domain stuff. I don't like Go, I hated the year I had to work in it @ Google. But frankly, it's better suited for 'server' type stuff, unless you're talking about a very specific type of server that has super intense latency guarantees. And now that Go has generics, I'd probably hate it less. Go is the new Java. Rust is the new C++…

We use rust for web dev purely for the type safety. Having business logic encoded as a state machine in an enum with compile time checked matches makes the world of difference

Scala, F#, OCaml, Kotlin,...

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#317

Post by pcthrowaway »

conradludgate wrote: post #290
HacklesRaised wrote: post #275

Is rusts most loved status simply Stockholm syndrome? I've really tried with rust, and we simply don't get on. I hear all the arguments about CVEs and wonder if rust will reduce the number of these problems simply by disabling the programmers that create them. I understand the draw, I want to love it, but i think I might not be smart enough.

Definitely not. I've been a full time rust developer for a long time now. Whenever I need to write some C# or Go or JS I honestly feel quite blind with a hand tied behind my back. I don't have the expressiveness of rusts type system and I don't have the safety of the strong compiler so I have to test my code a lot more thoroughly to be confident. With rust I'm pretty confident in my code from the start

> Whenever I need to write some C# or Go or JS I honestly feel quite blind with a hand tied behind my back. I don't have the expressiveness of rusts type system and I don't have the safety of the strong compiler

How would you compare it to Typescript? Having become a recent convert, I feel the same way going back to Javascript now

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#318

Post by wheelerof4te »

jstx1 wrote: post #311
HacklesRaised wrote: post #275

Is rusts most loved status simply Stockholm syndrome? I've really tried with rust, and we simply don't get on. I hear all the arguments about CVEs and wonder if rust will reduce the number of these problems simply by disabling the programmers that create them. I understand the draw, I want to love it, but i think I might not be smart enough.

No, it's a selection effect. The stackoverflow most loved metric is people_who_want_to_keep_using_the_language / people_who_have_used_it_in_the_past_year Since Rust is so early in its adoption and there are few jobs, many of the responders are hobbyists who are into Rust, like it and want to keep using; not necessarily people who use it for work. And since you only take into account the people who have used it in the…

This comment right here.

For most people who program for a living, the hype over Rust means little. They need to use what is in the industry right now. Often, that is a tried and true language that is relatively easy to learn and use.

Having a complex programming language which limits you and controls how you use it does not sound appealing to those who need a feature done, fast.

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#319

Post by Morgawr »

adastra22 wrote: post #251
mikebenfield wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty damn mainstream nowadays, yes. Quite a few big tech companies are either actively doing much of their new systems programming in Rust, or else dipping their toes in. I honestly don't know of a big tech company that is happy with the idea of just continuing to use C++ indefinitely - they are _all_ looking for alternatives, and Rust is the most obvious option.

> I honestly don't know of a big tech company that is happy with the idea of just continuing to use C++ indefinitely Every game company ever. And Google.

The Google team I work on (ChromeOS, crosvm[0] specifically) has been transitioning to Rust for a lot of our new services (mostly crosvm and stuff that interacts with it) and I couldn't be happier :)

[0] https://google.github.io/crosvm/

Re: Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

#320

Post by baby »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #275

Is rusts most loved status simply Stockholm syndrome? I've really tried with rust, and we simply don't get on. I hear all the arguments about CVEs and wonder if rust will reduce the number of these problems simply by disabling the programmers that create them. I understand the draw, I want to love it, but i think I might not be smart enough.

I’d say no. Been doing Rust for 3 years now and I have decided that I will never again accept a job offer that makes me write C++ or Java.
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