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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

#321

Post by pjmlp »

DeathArrow wrote: post #222
FpUser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I don't understand why so many people lately seem to want to use Rust for web domain stuff." >"Rust is the new C++. Let's just stick with that." I write "web domain stuff" in C++ and it is incredibly easy (well for me at least). In C++ I could always use my own styles / paradigms / patterns etc. etc. Not forced to any particular way. And modern C++ is incredibly safe if one wishes. So if it is bad idea to write "we…

That's not my experience. I'm 3 times more productive at writing web apps in C# than in C++ and that is not even taking into account compile times and hot reload and doing unit tests. Maybe I'm the worst C++ programmer in history and maybe I didn't spent too much time in trying to write web apps in C++ - it was just to test if it's a viable approach - but that was my particular experience. Aside from doing more boile…

Depends on the ecosystem, while I agree with you, at least on Microsoft stack there were always nice tooling to write C++ applications for web apps.

Before .NET we had ATLServer, then C++/CLI.

They also published some frameworks for writing web APIs in C++.

Now, I would also advise C# and then if needed, to call into C++ via P/Invoke (or C++/CLI, C++/WinRT if on Windows), than exposing C++ directly into the wire.

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

#322

Post by pjmlp »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #91
FpUser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I don't understand why so many people lately seem to want to use Rust for web domain stuff." >"Rust is the new C++. Let's just stick with that." I write "web domain stuff" in C++ and it is incredibly easy (well for me at least). In C++ I could always use my own styles / paradigms / patterns etc. etc. Not forced to any particular way. And modern C++ is incredibly safe if one wishes. So if it is bad idea to write "we…

I wrote plenty of vaguely web stuff in C++ at Google. A lot of services at Google are C++. But it's kind of, not how the rest of the industry expects things. And most of that stuff there is now moving to Go.

I doubt pretty much that SAP and Adobe would rewrite their enterprise products in Go.

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

#323

Post by renonce »

adeon wrote: post #10

I wish there was a Rust-like programming language that was just a little bit higher level than Rust. I like Rust's wide ecosystem with high quality packages, the nice type system, traits, the idea that my code generally runs pretty fast even if I'm being lazy about writing good code, and my code usually working correctly if it compiles. I care about speed and correctness but Rust makes me also care about ownership an…

Would it be possible to do something like Rust+Go where you integrate Go code natively into Rust? So Go pointers become `GoPtr` where `GoPtr: Copy + GC` etc. Then all Go structs implement `GoStruct` which would have a static method called `reflect` that returns all the information required for type reflection. One thing I love about Rust is its genericity that at least makes imagining such things possible, though I do expect a lot of engineering effort.

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

#324

Post by neonsunset »

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

Can support this - I'm a full-time C# SE but learning Rust on weekends has taught me so much and gave me an entirely new perspective when it comes to reasoning about memory and data structures.

I don't know why but haven't seen many posts on how the combination of Rust's trait system, implicit conditional returns and strict enforcement of im/mutability of state allows one to handle significantly higher amount of states the application can take in the same amount of code. Other languages usually have you writing thousands of lines of verbose error handling and state validation code and traits allow for a superior way to compose behavior over standard interfaces / abstract classes.

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

#325

Post by secondcoming »

kenhwang wrote: post #208
mwcampbell wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So much of this pain is caused by premature optimization. Part of the problem is that Rust itself has such lofty aspirations to do it all (particularly "abstraction without overhead"), and is largely successful at that. So if I compromise on efficiency, it feels like my code is unworthy of the language it's written in. Also, it's easy to feel that the slightest inefficiency puts us on a slippery slope to the bloat…

I just tell everyone, just write Rust like you'd write Scala. Don't try to optimize the crap out of anything until you need it, especially if no one else is going to use your code. Just make the allocations. Even if you write it that way it's still significantly more performant and lightweight than the alternatives without much loss in productivity.

This doesn’t bode well for Rust in Linux!

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

#327

Post by pjmlp »

dataangel wrote: post #175
FpUser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I don't understand why so many people lately seem to want to use Rust for web domain stuff." >"Rust is the new C++. Let's just stick with that." I write "web domain stuff" in C++ and it is incredibly easy (well for me at least). In C++ I could always use my own styles / paradigms / patterns etc. etc. Not forced to any particular way. And modern C++ is incredibly safe if one wishes. So if it is bad idea to write "we…

Modern C++ isn't really safe. Safe means the compiler catches you, generally C++ compilers don't. Trivial example is iterator invalidation -- even with all warnings and errors on compilers don't catch it.

Not a Visual C++ user I imagine, because that is exactly what enabling _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL does.

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

#328

Post by wiz21c »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #294
timClicks wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really is wonderful once you make it. Which resources have you used to learn?

I did ok with Rustlings and I read the 'The Book', I'd say I am largely struggling with async and lifetimes. I have spent most of my career in C, C++, Objective-C and have recently tried Zig, which I enjoyed, possibly because of it's brevity, and I read through the Jakt programming language docs, which was much more familiar to me but I think if you only used Rust with ARC it would be a simple language to adopt so th…

I've been leraning rust with a pet project of mine (an Apple2 emulator). That was a bit too complex for a start as I had threads and a bit of architecture to structure my code correctly. But in the end, I know understand how rust does threads and memory allocation and I'm now much less intimated by the type system. I still don't get the lifetimes.

Moreover, a lot of the libraries in rust needs you to understand the type system thoroughly sometimes to use them, and some of them use the typesystem to enforce some specific behavior (without telling you :-)). For example, the logger mechanism in rust makes it very hard to dynamically change the logger implementation at run time but it doesn't explain why (in the end, I think it has to do with thread safety, but I'm not sure).

It took me about the equivalent of 30 full days to get there. Although I'm an experienced programmer (C++,assembly,Java,python,R), the last 15 years have been python 99%. Had I continued with C++ all those years, I'm sure I'd understand rust much better.

So, just keep going and really listen to the borrow checker. The thing is really smart and sometimes, after a lot of pain, you understand that your own mental model was wrong :-)

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

#329

Post by oxff »

aphexairlines wrote: post #17
adeon wrote: post #10

I wish there was a Rust-like programming language that was just a little bit higher level than Rust. I like Rust's wide ecosystem with high quality packages, the nice type system, traits, the idea that my code generally runs pretty fast even if I'm being lazy about writing good code, and my code usually working correctly if it compiles. I care about speed and correctness but Rust makes me also care about ownership an…

I think that's ocaml. Higher level, with GC, nice type system, no traits but signatures and higher order modules might be enough for you, and a compiler that produces fast native binaries.

Ocaml is just a mess. Has like two standard libs. You'll just fighting everything but your application logic instead.

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

#330

Post by hazz99 »

lenkite wrote: post #303

Compare the Rust Handler-Dispatcher program with the Go Handler-Dispatcher program and look at the truly extraordinary complexity that Rust adds to what is effectively a simple design problem that any of us have implemented several times, if your career has had a few years of original coding. Handler-Dispatcher is not some complicated design pattern. It is very basic. Its implementation in any language should be shor…

I don’t think it’s true that any given “basic” design pattern should should necessarily be simple in every language.

Certain things are short and elegant in Rust. Certain things are short and elegant in Python. Each optimises for different things.

I also don’t believe it places “extraordinary complexity” on the shoulders of the programmer; this complexity is often a sign you’re doing something wrong, or working against the grain of what Rust is optimised for.

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