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

What is Rust and why is it so popular?

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 284 posts

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#71

Post by zozbot234 »

brohee wrote: post #60
zozbot234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to use Rust on a PIC12 with 32 bytes of data memory and max 256 code instructions? Of course not. Assembly is still king in this low-powered embedded class and will stay as such for the foreseeable future.

At the 10 year horizon the grandparent was using, the ultra low end of MCU may be substantially more powerful, with possibly lowend AM or RISC V being the smallest thing you can find. At some point, packaging will dominate cost over silicon for such small MCU so a better silicon won't cost much more...

Packaging will dominate silicon costs? I see plenty of silicon chips directly soldered onto PCB's for the smallest and cheapest applications, i.e. no packaging whatsoever.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#72

Post by adamnemecek »

jokoon wrote: post #68

This language is awesome, but I'm quite conservative when it comes to syntax. I don't like how Rust is trying to move away from C when considering syntax. I tend to prefer languages that can adopt the "C flavor". Python, in my view, does this very well: its syntax is simple, because it borrows a lot from C in its "flavor". Rust is not doing that, and that's a hurdle. In my view, the "C flavor" is very important becau…

Rust is C + ocaml. C doesn't have some of the features of Rust and in those cases it makes sense to adopt the ocaml syntax.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#73

Post by jayd16 »

MadWombat wrote: post #52
alerighi wrote: post #18

Rust is a great language if you use for what was intended, system programming and as safe substitute of C and C++. But it's not the answer of everything, to me it's nowadays abused in a lot of projects, there are instances of project where using Rust not only doesn't make a lot of sense but also can be slower than another languages, there are cases where Go is better, other where Node.js is better, other where Python…

OK, I will bite. If I had to come up with a case where Python is better than Rust, I would say with rapid prototyping and scientific computing. If you just want to try a few things out, python has faster development cycle and if you want to do some super clever math python has better library support. With a bit more mind stretching, I can make a case for Go with a bit more mind stretching. If you want to write a mass…

Can Rust do things like heap compaction? You could do it by hand I guess but its not exactly trivial. There's probably a whole class of problems the GC still excels at.

JVM tooling is also pretty nice. Can you trivially get deep app metrics from any Rust program?

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#74

Post by DCKing »

alxlaz wrote: post #34

Over the last couple of months I've been slowly, but steadily playing with Rust. I work on embedded systems and while it's gaining traction only slowly, it feels to me reasonably likely that we'll be seeing non-trivial applications in the next 8-10 years. I doubt that we'll see it used for low-power/resource-constrained firmware, but lots and lots of embedded systems are now bulky Linux boxes with years of uptime, an…

As someone who never much got into systems programming, Rust feels like a breath of fresh air. It makes systems programming way more accessible for me personally, coming from non-systems languages. Learning to write C well is just not something that appeals to me at all.

From mostly an outsiders' perspective, I just don't think C is a very nice programming language. It looks easy to to pick up and it probably is (for some definitions of "pick up"), but I don't think that's a good thing. The language gives you almost nothing. Pointers, structs, arrays, control flow. Not much else. I'm barely exaggerating when I say that all the C code I see looks like a chaotic pointer juggle fest for precisely that reason. The few features and library that it does have come with non-obvious gotchas that will punish you later.

Rust is probably much harder to "pick up", and way more complicated in general, but it's just, uh, more language. I'll take pattern matching, encouraging immutability, functional style programming, trait programming over C's simplicity any day of the week. The safety is extremely nice, but I think Rust's biggest eye-opener for me is that all these "higher level" features are just possible at (close to) the performance of C. That makes it very appealing to me.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#76

Post by pron »

jeltz wrote: post #65
pron wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternatives that more appeal to my taste in the works. Given the cost of changing language, any language, I'll wait and see how they turn out before making decisions.

Which ones are more to your taste? For me it is mostly Zig which seems closer to what I want to see in a language. Crystal also looks promising but I prefer languages without GC. Rust is a good language but it is a bit too complex and restrictive at times.

Yep, Zig is the one I like, and IMO it's a language that shows an interesting yet very simple model for what systems programming can be. But I'll admit that it's easier to look good before you're put to the test in the field, so I'll wait and see what becomes of it.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#77

Post by steveklabnik »

jayd16 wrote: post #73
MadWombat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I will bite. If I had to come up with a case where Python is better than Rust, I would say with rapid prototyping and scientific computing. If you just want to try a few things out, python has faster development cycle and if you want to do some super clever math python has better library support. With a bit more mind stretching, I can make a case for Go with a bit more mind stretching. If you want to write a mass…

Can Rust do things like heap compaction? You could do it by hand I guess but its not exactly trivial. There's probably a whole class of problems the GC still excels at. JVM tooling is also pretty nice. Can you trivially get deep app metrics from any Rust program?

I think you're asking rhetorically, but just in case:

1. Rust-the-language doesn't know anything about allocations, so strictly speaking, it cannot. Furthermore, without a GC, it's unclear how it could in the first place, given that a compaction would invalidate all pointers to that memory.

2. Certainly not to the same degree as the JVM, given that there's nothing inherently to inspect, like there is in languages with a runtime. You can instrument your own application, but that does mean doing the work yourself, and you only get as good of results as you put in in the first place.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#78

Post by calibas »

vperez wrote: post #64

Great article. One nitpick: > One of the biggest benefits of using a systems programming language is the ability to have control over low-level details. I think this is a misguided conflation of "systems programming" and "low-level programming", those are separate things. See http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming/

Ah, the eternal argument over what qualifies as "low-level". I think we can all agree it's not Javascript, but beyond that opinions vary greatly and it's mainly a semantic issue.

Re: What is Rust and why is it so popular?

#80

Post by pron »

DCKing wrote: post #74
alxlaz wrote: post #34

Over the last couple of months I've been slowly, but steadily playing with Rust. I work on embedded systems and while it's gaining traction only slowly, it feels to me reasonably likely that we'll be seeing non-trivial applications in the next 8-10 years. I doubt that we'll see it used for low-power/resource-constrained firmware, but lots and lots of embedded systems are now bulky Linux boxes with years of uptime, an…

As someone who never much got into systems programming, Rust feels like a breath of fresh air. It makes systems programming way more accessible for me personally, coming from non-systems languages. Learning to write C well is just not something that appeals to me at all. From mostly an outsiders' perspective, I just don't think C is a very nice programming language. It looks easy to to pick up and it probably is (for…

> As someone who never much got into systems programming, Rust is a breath of fresh air.

I think that's part of the problem :) Because Rust looks high level it appeals to people used to high-level programming. But once you get into systems programming, the issues are different from high-level programming, and you're less happy to pay for features that solve other problems. What I'm saying is, obviously, a matter of taste, and some people doing low-level programming do prefer C++'s high-level feel, which is also found in Rust. I hope it goes without saying that just programming in Rust -- or C++ -- doesn't mean you're doing systems programming unless you're, say, writing a device driver, a kernel, a GC, a game framework etc.

Post reply on HN