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Rust is for Professionals

gregoryszorc.com

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Re: Rust is for Professionals

#51

Post by skohan »

mnd999 wrote: post #20

I skimmed it, but I think what the author is getting at is that rust demands rigour. The kind of rigour required when failure is a problem and this tends to be the kind of code people get paid to write. I guess the reverse is also true, if you’re writing the kind of code where failure doesn’t matter (e.g. spikes, experimentation, just messing about) perhaps rust isn’t the best choice.

I think it's a little bit of a trap to fall into to believe that since Rust:

1. provides some unique benefits in terms of safety, and

2. is hard to program and requires rigor

that all that rigor is "worth it", and that it makes you a better programmer to put up with it.

Don't get me wrong, Rust's tradeoffs are valuable for some use-cases, but there are many, many use-cases where a GC'd language will work just fine, and it doesn't make you less professional for choosing a higher level tool which you can be more productive in if you don't have performance or memory constraints.

I also think, as the author alludes to, that many programmers get their first exposure to algebraic types and the elimination of NPE's through Rust, and get the false impression that the benefits of these features are somehow related to the additional complexity required by Rust. But these features are not related. Languages like Swift have shown us that you can get many of the benefits of Rust in terms of providing an "if it compiles it works" experience without many of the challenges Rust imposes on the programmer.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#54

Post by api »

sanxiyn wrote: post #26
ahelwer wrote: post #12

Here I am on day three of an attempt to modify a rust program with logic that would have taken about twenty minutes to implement in C# or Java. It has to do with operations on strings (use a regex to find a string in some text, escape all the regex-reserved characters in that string, then use the string as a regex to find other occurrences of itself in the text) so I get that I'm really thrown into the borrow-checker…

You can't learn Rust by StackOverflow, that just doesn't work. It is well known, I repeat this everytime I see it happening, and they never listen. It's deeply frustrating.

You can't learn any language by StackOverflow, but some languages are more forgiving to people who don't actually know them.

If you don't really know Rust and in particular understand the borrow checker and how it works (and why it exists), you are going to have a bad time.

Rust in general has a learning curve, but once you do learn it there is a payoff. If Rust code compiles (and if you didn't use 'unsafe'), you can be pretty damn sure it is free of a long list of potential bugs including concurrency bugs, buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, alignment problems, double-free, use-after-free, stack smashing, most memory leaks, and so on. The runtime cost of that assurance is less in Rust than in any other language I know, and sometimes the safety of Rust actually lets you do things in higher performing ways that would be dangerous to code in C. In C/C++ you have to knit your own straightjacket, and yours may not be as well thought out or efficient as the one the Rust compiler issues you.

I've really started to appreciate Rust's safety. If the code compiles there can still be bugs, but they're going to be higher up at the logic/algorithm level instead of the annoying sorts of bugs that constantly crop up in C/C++.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#55

Post by fzzzy »

kzhukov wrote: post #41
skohan wrote: post #17

Rust is currently my favorite language for personal projects. It's got a very good value proposition in terms of giving some high level features along with low level control and performance, great compatibility story, and the tooling and community is absolutely great. However , as the manager of a technical team, I would not choose it for professional projects. The learning curve is very steep, and to reap the benefi…

> safety-critical applications Nope, Rust is also not suitable for these tasks since it doesn't have a certified toolchain (e.g. ISO26262 for automotive or DO-178 for aerospace). > embedded Current LLVM-based compiler lacks support for some platforms (e.g. Xtensa for some ESP32 MCUs).

It took me two hours to compile the esp32 fork of rustc on a 2015 macbook pro. Not ideal, but it works just fine.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#57

Post by neonological »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #23
jvanderbot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. It's not going to replace Python, and if maintenance is the metric, then "rewrite it in rust" is not the right move. But I do think Rust will gain traction, be a round a long time, and slowly become a complement to existing C/C++ ecosystems through wrapping and binding. I'm just not sure the other way will materialize. Until Rust can be used to feed back into C/C++ ecosystems and long-standing projects (like t…

At this point Rust is not the prmary ecosystem for anything. The important and exciting new things are written in C++, not Rust. Rust has no advantages over C++ once you know C++.

This statement is wrong. Rust has many advantages over C++. Knowing c++ doesn’t make these advantages disappear. It’s like saying you know assembly language and can write 100% bug free code in assembly so C++ has no advantage over it.

Realistically, both languages have advantages and disadvantages.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#58

Post by yagizdegirmenci »

> Rust Makes You a Better Overall Programmer

I agree with that, but this applied to nearly any language for me. I started doing Python back when 2013, then i learned Go, i started writing better Python code, then i learned C, i started writing better Go code, then i learned Rust, i started writing better code in general. The more you play with other language the more you learn other programming paradigms, it changes the way you thinking about programming completely.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#59

Post by ahelwer »

sanxiyn wrote: post #49
ahelwer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah, that's why I went and read a bunch of the book. But I still run into lots of issues. Like what the hell is a borrow cow and when would I want to use it? And how do I fix the "temporary value dropped when borrowed" error in a series of maps on options?

Clone more.

See that's seemingly good (and popular) advice, which I didn't find anywhere in the book.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#60

Post by Koshkin »

Depends on the meaning of the word 'professionals.' Most of those who earn their living by coding (which is whom I would call professionals), use JavaScript, C++, Java, or C# - and, I'm afraid, will continue to do so for many years to come.
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