Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

Post by jstimpfle » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #536

lelanthran wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much of what is routinely used to capture semantics into mainstream C++ libraries is wholly impossible to express in Rust. (C is not even a participant, here.) This is not about template metaprogramming, just ordinary stuff. Do you have any examples?

All above languages are turning complete, so if you can express it in one you can express it in another. The question isn't can you write it, the question is how hard is it to do, and how performant the code will be. The heart of C++ is destructors: a bit of code that you can write and the compiler will ensure runs when code goes out of scope/is deleted. You can do this in C by remembering to manually call the right…

Post by Animats » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

rascul wrote: post #455

jedisct1 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's ecosystem is amazingly stable. Its rich standard library helps, but in general, there's a lot of attention to backward compatibility. Once an application has been written in Go, updating dependencies or using a more recent compiler version is a breeze. Nothing breaks. Rust code on the other hand comes with a high maintenance cost. The ecosystem is still very unstable. Core dependencies constantly have breaking A…

> The ecosystem is still very unstable. Core dependencies constantly have breaking API changes, or get abandoned/deprecated/superseded. Keeping everything up to date is not trivial and very time consuming. I'm only a hobby coder but this has hit me a few times. I suspect this will level out in time, though.

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

wheelerof4te wrote: post #631

crabbygrabby wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust only limits you from writing nonsense code. Seriously that's what the compiler is doing, and that's what people are complaining about. "Why won't this language let me write bad code!". I get it it's hard to learn at first, but, it sounds a little silly to people who have spent the time learning the language... Believe it or not industry has and is continuing to adopt rust. Microsoft, AWS, government agencys in E…

"I invite you to join the community and learn it. It's a lot of fun once you get proficient with it." I will if the Rust community agrees on a lighter, less complex language core. "Microsoft, AWS, government agencys in Europe, the Linux kernel itself (the only other language allowed there is C - think about it)." Again, they are using only a subset of the language. Linus allowed it in the kernel once devs agreed only…

Post by Shikadi » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #621

Shikadi wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you understand what safe means in this context. One common example is modifying a vector element by reference. If you grab a reference to an item, push something else to the vector, then try to access through that reference, the vector may have re allocated during the push and you're either no longer looking at valid memory because it's been freed, or you're looking at a stale copy of the element. I d…

I'm 100% sure that I understand what safe means in this context. All modern GCed languages are memory safe and will not access invalid memory regions unless you use specifically unsafe features. > One common example is modifying a vector element by reference. If you grab a reference to an item, push something else to the vector, then try to access through that reference, the vector may have re allocated during the pu…

Post by justinsaccount » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

dgunay wrote: post #373

adastra22 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your primary criticism of golang is that its creator doesn't like syntax highlighting, then it must be doing pretty good.

It is mostly an example of the mindset that I think GP is trying to illustrate. Go has nil where Rust has Option. Go has weird not-quite-tuple returns & if err != nil where Rust has Result. Go has no real enum concept, where rust has its powerful enums and matching constructs. Go has generics, but only after a decade of pressure from users (and even then, they are much much less useful than Rust's type system). I lik…

  * Option? I don't mind if err != nil, but sure, it would simplify some things.
  * Result and real tuples? awesome.
  * real enums? sign me up.

  impl Execute for Dispatcher
  where
    H: Fn(&'a Update) -> Fut + Send + Sync + 'a,
    Fut: Future + Send + 'a,
    Tail: Execute + Send + Sync + 'a,
  {