Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

collabora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 675 posts

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#331

Post by gwd »

globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

> novice programmers

I think Rust has too high a learning curve, and too many features, for novice programmers in general.

> Embedded is still C, games are C++, scientific and data are Python and R (I'm talking in general here). What is the niche for Rust?

Rust has already made huge inroads in CLIs and TUIs, as far as I can tell. Embedded is a slow-moving beast by design, but it seems to me (as someone in an adjacent area) that it could be a big win there, particularly in places that need safety certification.

All the stories of people using Rust for game development are about people who tried it and find that it doesn't fit: It makes experimentation and exploration slow enough that the reduction in minor bugs in game logic isn't really worth it.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#332

Post by tialaramex »

mgaunard wrote: post #316
jll29 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think c++, the language, is ready for the modern world. However, c++, the community, seems to be struck at least 20 years in the past. Good point. A language that gets updated by adding a lot of features is DIVERGING from a community that has mostly people that still use a lot of the C baggage in C++, and only a few folks that use a lot of template abstraction at the other end of the spectrum. Since in larger sys…

A lot of people using C++ don't actually use any libraries. I've observed the opposite with Rust. People choose C++ because it's a flexible language that lets you do whatever you want. Meanwhile Rust is a constrained and opinionated thing that only works if you do things "the right way".

> People choose C++ because it's a flexible language that lets you do whatever you want.

You went on a bit too long. C++ lets you do whatever. Whether you wanted that is not its concern. That's handily illustrated in Matt Godbolt's talk - you provided a floating point value but that's inappropriate? Whatever. Negative values for unsigned? Whatever.

This has terrible ergonomics and the consequences were entirely predictable.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#333

Post by notimetorelax »

globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

Those mega corps that you talk about use C++ too. It’s just a false dichotomy argument you’re making.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#334

Post by chickenbuckcar »

globalnode wrote: post #327

My admittedly uninformed impression of Rust is that its a lot like Go (in spirit?), a language invented to shepherd novice programmers into not making mistakes with resource usage. I imagine faceless shameless mega-corps with thousands of Rust/Go peons coding away on the latest soulless business apps. Designed to funnel the ignorant masses down corridors of dark pattern click bait and confusing UX. Having exposed my…

Economic inertia alone can already enough.

Numpy use C/C++ because BLAS use C/C++ Torch originally use Lua, then switch to Python because popularity

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#335

Post by moomin »

jeroenhd wrote: post #32
dvratil wrote: post #8

The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking r…

The result type does make for some great API design, but SerenityOS shows that this same paradigm also works fine in C++. That includes something similar to the ? operator, though it's closer to a raw function call. SerenityOS is the first functional OS (as in "boots on actual hardware and has a GUI") I've seen that dares question the 1970s int main() using modern C++ constructs instead, and the API is simply a lot b…

I’ve seen it argued that, in practice, there’s two C++ communities. One is fundamentally OK with constantly upgrading their code (those with enterprise refactoring tools are obviously in this camp, but it’s more a matter of attitude than technology) and those that aren’t. C++ is fundamentally caught between those two.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#336

Post by chickenzzzzu »

dvratil wrote: post #8

The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking r…

why not just read the function you are calling to determine the way it expects you to handle errors?

after all, if a library exposes too many functions to you, it isn't a good library.

what good is it for me to have a result type if i have to call 27 functions with 27 different result types just to rotate a cube?

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#337

Post by Arnavion »

michalsustr wrote: post #299
Arnavion wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various kind of "desktop" applications like databases and video games use custom non-global allocators - per-thread, per arena, etc - because they have specific memory allocation and usage patterns that a generic allocator does not handle as well as targeted ones can. My current $dayjob involves a "server" application that needs to run in a strict memory limit. We had to write our own allocator and collections becaus…

Did you publish these by any chance?

Sorry, the code is closed source.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#338

Post by tialaramex »

Rucadi wrote: post #180
jeroenhd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The result type does make for some great API design, but SerenityOS shows that this same paradigm also works fine in C++. That includes something similar to the ? operator, though it's closer to a raw function call. SerenityOS is the first functional OS (as in "boots on actual hardware and has a GUI") I've seen that dares question the 1970s int main() using modern C++ constructs instead, and the API is simply a lot b…

I created a library "cpp-match" that tries to bring the "?" operator into C++, however it uses a gnu-specific feature ( https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Statement-Exprs.html ), I did support msvc falling-back to using exceptions for the short-circuit mechanism. However it seems like C++ wants to only provide this kind of pattern via monadic operations.

You can't really do Try (which is that operator's name in Rust) because C++ lacks a ControlFlow type which is how Try reflects the type's decision about whether to exit early.

You can imitate the beginner experience of the ? operator as magically handling trivial error cases by "just knowing" what should happen, but it's not the same thing as the current Try feature.

Barry Revzin has a proposal for some future C++ (lets say C++ 29) to introduce statement expressions, the syntax is very ugly even by C++ standards but it would semantically solve the problem you had.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#339

Post by Gazoche »

GardenLetter27 wrote: post #14

It's a shame Rust doesn't have keyword arguments or named tuples to make handling some of these things easier without Args/Options structs boilerplate.

Agreed, coming from Python it's one of the main things I miss in Rust. You can achieve something similar with the builder pattern or with structs + the Default trait, but it takes much more effort.

Re: Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

#340

Post by aw1621107 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #305
aw1621107 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> speaking of which, according to another C++ talk, something like 60% of rust crates are dependent on unsafe rust. It's probably not the source of the stats you had in mind since it's discussing something slightly different, but the Rust Foundation built a tool called Painter [0] for this kind of analysis. According to that [1]: > As of May 2024, there are about 145,000 crates; of which, approximately 127,000 contai…

> there's also a whole other argument that the hardware is unsafe so all Rust code will depend on unsafe somewhere or another to run on actual hardware, but that's probably getting a bit into the weeds. That's not going into the weeds, by that logic (Nirvana fallacy) no language is safe, you're going to die, so why bother about anything? Just lie down and wait for bugs to eat you.

Perhaps I got the quip wrong. I was basically trying to reference discussions I've seen elsewhere along the lines of "Rust is not actually memory-safe because it needs unsafe", sometimes followed by the argument you outlined. Those discussions can get a bit involved and I don't think this is a good time/place for them, so I more or less just wanted to reference it without spending much time/words on actually delving into it.
Post reply on HN