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Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

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Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#51

Post by Manishearth »

Bromskloss wrote: post #8
ktamura wrote: post #4

As a long-time developer marketing person, I must say Rust is kicking ass, not just as a language but as a community. They are deeply strategic. 1. Clear audience target: They aren't going after C++ gurus or C magicians but people who are new to systems programming. From Klabnik to Katz to literally everyone in the community, they are consistent with this messaging. 2. As part of 1, they have invested a lot in teachi…

> developer marketing person What is that? > They aren't going after C++ gurus or C magicians Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?

Sure they do. But when you say "gurus" and "magicians" these are people who have spent decades with the language and are awesome at it. It's possible that Rust may improve their lives, but it would take years before they have that same level of proficiency. Not because Rust is hard, but because they are so good at C++ and getting that good in anything is hard.

Rust does market to C/++ people, a lot. We just don't market to the super-awesome C++ folks. It's the same reason I preferred Word 2003 over the new stuff for half a decade. I had years of memorized shortcuts, custom macros, and general ui familiarity. I could eventually learn the shiny new Word and become as good, but the activation energy for that is too much and I was happy with 2003.

Rust isn't only going after non-systems folks. The community is roughly half systemsy. But it may seem this way because Rust tries very hard to not alienate non-systems people with jargon and unexplained systems concepts.

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#52

Post by epoch1970 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #40
Thaxll wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is not stable. The language is not battle tested like C/C++.

I will certainly concede the second, but we put a _lot_ of effort into ensuring that Rust is stable. Things have changed a lot since the pre-1.0 days.

> Things have changed a lot since the pre-1.0 days.

The instability of the pre-1.0 days left a very bad impression on many people who tried Rust then. They came to know Rust as a compile-today-but-not-tomorrow kind of language. What, if anything, is being done to try to inform these people that the situation has changed, to encourage them to try Rust again? What's being done to restore Rust's reputation?

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#53

Post by steveklabnik »

fdr wrote: post #49

I'd like to be able to use something like rust, and maybe I will for smaller projects or for novelty sake, but I chafe over how slow compilation time is relative to C (not C++!) projects last I checked. On the hardware of yesteryear, a parallel compile could build Postgres in about 45 seconds (750-1305KLOC, depending on measurement) , and user mode Linux (which doesn't compile so many drivers) in about a minute.

We've made steady improvements here, so depending on when you checked, it might be much better.

The real improvements will come when incremental compilation lands. The precursor requirements are just landing now; so it won't be immediately here, but it will be soonish.

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#54

Post by mkawia »

bjourne wrote: post #33

Performance. Rust is still twice as slow as C ( http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php... ) which is still a fair bit slower than if a skilled assembly programmer had taken on the task. Rust aficionados will say that their compiler is getting better, but so is C. clang has gotten faster than gcc on some benchmarks and on some others gcc has catched up and is now faster than clang again. But what…

Isn't Rust's biggest advantage is safety , I make websites with golang , I can't stand the nil-ness and all the mutation mess I easily get myself into, could use a safer type system.

Sometimes you just need safety and correctness .

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#55

Post by quickben »

valarauca1 wrote: post #43
bjourne wrote: post #33

Performance. Rust is still twice as slow as C ( http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php... ) which is still a fair bit slower than if a skilled assembly programmer had taken on the task. Rust aficionados will say that their compiler is getting better, but so is C. clang has gotten faster than gcc on some benchmarks and on some others gcc has catched up and is now faster than clang again. But what…

This difference on this test is caused by Rust not having stabilized SIMD support. Also Rust support hand rolled assembly (on nightly) that C has. On non-SIMD tasks Rust/C are neck and neck https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html You're just cherry picking benchmarks. In the cases you care about raw number crunching power you'll likely be using a GPU not SIMD instructions as CPU's are roughly 3-4 orde…

GPUs aren't panacea. Such generalizations are wrong and will have you rearchitecture approaches after GPU io bottlenecks.

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#56

Post by valarauca1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #25
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #11

Is there any reason why embedded software for autonomous vehicles is still being written in C/C++? This last week I was talking to a friend at a company that makes a small autonomous vehicle. During testing their prototype suddenly went off in a straight line. They had to pull a safety to halt the vehicle or it would have gone straight forever into the Pacific Ocean. Turns out there was an unsafe access to a variable…

Industry standards, certified compilers and cargo cult are usually the main reasons.

This is the main reason. Also legacy. I work on a lot of embedded code for $AUTO_MANUFACTOR some of our code bases go back to the 90's.

The code base is so modified by macros/typedefs its hardly even C anymore.

Not to mention the LLVM has to support the embedded device you are targeting. And Rust's support of legacy CPU's (8008, 8080, 80386, 68000) are lacking.

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#57

Post by mfukar »

gue5t wrote: post #9
Scarbutt wrote: post #2

Rust reduces the amount of state I need to keep track of in my brain. I doubt it, the mental overhead of doing "safe memory programming" in Rust is very high. Edit: all good replies, want to clarify and forgot to mention that I was comparing to languages with a GC, since I'm seeing Rust being used for lots of stuff, in a general purpose programming language sense (like creating web frameworks for example). Also, for…

Designing memory-safe programs in C requires a programmer to reason about the same domains as doing so in Rust, but C doesn't double-check you to make sure you get everything right. With no guard rails, C is a lot more stressful. Re: reducing mental state for a programmer, algebraic datatypes in general decrease the size of the state space of your program by making many illegal states unrepresentable. Without advance…

Why are we throwing away all the work done on static & dynamic analysis tools for C programs in this kind of discussions? Programmers are crippled just for picking C? Come on..

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#58

Post by glibgil »

mkawia wrote: post #50
glibgil wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who markets to developers. The language and context should clear up the ambiguity that they don't mean they are merely a developer that works in marketing for something like, say selling potato chips

So like a lite developer advocate

It used to be called advertising, then marketing, then evengelizing and now advocacy, yes

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#59

Post by dpc_pw »

bjourne wrote: post #33

Performance. Rust is still twice as slow as C ( http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php... ) which is still a fair bit slower than if a skilled assembly programmer had taken on the task. Rust aficionados will say that their compiler is getting better, but so is C. clang has gotten faster than gcc on some benchmarks and on some others gcc has catched up and is now faster than clang again. But what…

Rust can, somewhat is already and ultimately will beat C on performance, due to way better guarantees on pointer non-aliasing. See eg. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146159/is-fortran-faster-...

Other than that Rust has way better zero-cost abstractions, so in practice allows writing faster code, as in C there are sanity limits after which you give up and write slower, but easier to manage code, as macro processor sucks, and type system is trying to stab you in the back at every step.

Good example is `qsort`: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/c_standard_library/c_function_...

Re: Why Rust for Low-Level Linux Programming?

#60

Post by xyience »

Scarbutt wrote: post #2

Rust reduces the amount of state I need to keep track of in my brain. I doubt it, the mental overhead of doing "safe memory programming" in Rust is very high. Edit: all good replies, want to clarify and forgot to mention that I was comparing to languages with a GC, since I'm seeing Rust being used for lots of stuff, in a general purpose programming language sense (like creating web frameworks for example). Also, for…

This is basically why I ditched Rust as soon as I found out about Nim. No mental gymnastics making me feel like I should be part of a group mind, super fast, super small binaries, optional GC, and memory unsafe stuff allowed with standard pointers and alloc/free available with or without the GC on elsewhere. I suspect Rust would be better for avionics and other high-value systems though, replacing Ada...
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