51–60 of 103 posts
In my opinion this is the way _not_ to learn Rust. These syntaxes are not important at all, and doesn't introduce lifetimes (which is by far the most important part of the language for deciding whether to use it or not). Any blog about learning Rust for beginners should just contain information that helps the reader decide _whether_ she should put in the time required for learning it, then refer to the great Rust Pro…
Nice blog post. Nonetheless, to a new learner like me, the hardest part of rust is not its syntax; it is the ownership management. Sometimes I easily know how to implement a task efficiently in other languages but I have to fight the compiler in rust. I either need to reorganize data structures, which takes effort, or to make a compromise by cloning objects, which affects performance. Note that I do agree with rust d…
This is exactly why I prefer Rust, eh, for everything. It forces you to think harder about your data structures and to better organize/understand your program and how data flows, gets consumed and get output. You can ignore that in other languages, but this comes at a cost later.
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Because when you pass by reference, you lend the value (or to phrase it the other way around: the function borrows the value). And so when the function’s done, it gives you the value back (because that’s how borrowing works, in the everyday sense of the word, as well as in th Rust sense)
This is either wrong or incomplete. When you call a function `f()` with some `&mut`, the callee gets a `&mut`, not a borrowed `&mut &mut`. The callee doesn't borrow the ref mut, it gets the actual ref mut, and for some time you have multiple mutable references in the same scope. How?
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This is exactly why I prefer Rust, eh, for everything. It forces you to think harder about your data structures and to better organize/understand your program and how data flows, gets consumed and get output. You can ignore that in other languages, but this comes at a cost later.
I've used Rust quite a bit, but I would love to hear more about this. Is this comparing to lower level languages like C/C++/Zig, or higher level GC'd languages? What problems does it make us think more about up-front, and do you think it's due to single ownership (in the C++ and Rust sense) or the borrow checker?
Here is an example that now frustrates me about JavaScript. I don't know if some variables "MyVal" declared somewhere is global, local or how transfer it around. Global variables no longer makes sense to me. In Rust, global variables are possible but they are obvious and their scope is completely within your control. Now, all the data is there and it's up to you how to structure it, move it around, store it, etc.. You have to think these through before doing any code. If you don't think well enough, the Rust compiler (borrow/ownership thing) will start to give you headaches.
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> The vast majority of beginners can just learn "& means any number of readers and no writers, &mut means one writer and no readers". But 'beginning' is never the hard part of learning any programming language, at least for a programmer. The hard part is going from having learned the basics to getting stuff done. Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. The writers in that thread can't even de…
> Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. It's not hard, you just add boilerplate. Cloning data, using interior mutability, or adding ref counting to deal with cases where multiple "owners" can keep an object around independently. Then removing the boilerplate is how you do optimization, once you've gotten things to work. The opposite of other languages where low-level code is the most verbos…
Yep, that's the standard Rust aficionado flat insistence: "You're finding it hard. You're just wrong". Yet with more learning time than I've put into any other language I've learned, I have been unable to use Rust for real (ie. beyond beginner toys). A quick count of langs I've used professionally comes to about 10; I've learned many more to play with, much more successfully than with Rust, in much less time than I've spent with Rust. This reflects the experience of everyone I know who's tried it out (I'm the last man standing, having another crack at it this year).
The cultural peculiarity of this is that, in a field that generally lauds effort and intelligence, Rust advocates uniquely consider 'hard' or 'difficult' to be negative criticism. I don't hear this from (say) Haskell or Scala programmers. I certainly don't consider difficulty a negative - it depends on whether the payoffs are commensurate, and for Rust I think they are (I'd just quit otherwise).
As I'm 100% satisfied (no matter how often I'm unconvincingly 'corrected') that Rust is indeed harder than most programming languages to learn, I can only categorise this peculiarity as denial. Denial usually has ideological origins. I'm not entirely sure what they are in this case, though I have some ideas. These do feed into a sense that although I like the language, I don't think I like the Rust community much. I get strong religious/culty vibes from it - similar to the worst of the Linux community (for the record I also am a f/t Linux user, and I think that community has moderated considerably over time).
I keep saving these Rust resources for a near future... Am i the only one?? I really hope to start using Rust in 2023, probably for some kind of API gateway experimentation
Yeah I wish there was a strong jobs market for Rust developers then I'd feel like I wasn't wasting my time.
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> The vast majority of beginners can just learn "& means any number of readers and no writers, &mut means one writer and no readers". But 'beginning' is never the hard part of learning any programming language, at least for a programmer. The hard part is going from having learned the basics to getting stuff done. Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. The writers in that thread can't even de…
> Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. I’d argue C and C++ are both harder. It’s hard to even get these to build once you move past trivia examples (including libraries etc). > I find the denial of Rust's difficulty (and not even centred on the borrow checker - it's the use of just about every commmon library) just very very strange Some of us just didn’t find it that hard. Like, I get tha…
> I’d argue C and C++ are both harder. It’s hard to even get these to build once you move past trivia examples (including libraries etc).
Agree I overstated that. What I mean is that, out of the difficult to learn languages, Rust is the only one whose community for opaque reasons denies the difficulty.
> Some of us just didn’t find it that hard.
Why the difference I don't know. So far everyone I know who has learned it has dropped out because they just couldn't get practical traction with it. My guess is that most people who say they don't find it hard are either longstanding C/C++ programmers, and/or are learning at work where they have immediate help & scaffolding.
What is odd is that rather than responding to difficulties with a curious "Oh, I didn't find it hard, I wonder where the difference lay", Rust advocates tend to come back with an aggressive 'proof' that Rust is factually not hard to learn (with implications we can all guess at). No other programming community frequently does this in my experience (and I have brushed against many). That community attitude itself must have causes that are worth thinking about.
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> The vast majority of beginners can just learn "& means any number of readers and no writers, &mut means one writer and no readers". But 'beginning' is never the hard part of learning any programming language, at least for a programmer. The hard part is going from having learned the basics to getting stuff done. Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. The writers in that thread can't even de…
> Rust is harder than any other mainstream language to do that in. I’d argue C and C++ are both harder. It’s hard to even get these to build once you move past trivia examples (including libraries etc). > I find the denial of Rust's difficulty (and not even centred on the borrow checker - it's the use of just about every commmon library) just very very strange Some of us just didn’t find it that hard. Like, I get tha…
C++, on the other hand, is exceedingly complex and a difficult language to become proficient in, though modern C++ is an improvement in that regard. Some of this is due to decades of legacy cruft, some is due to it being an atypically expressive systems language, all of which has been stirred together.