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

Rust is for Professionals

gregoryszorc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 157 posts

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#71

Post by novok »

sylvain_kerkour wrote: post #63
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…

As an indie developer, switching from Go to Rust for web APIs was extremely satisfying. At first there was a productivity loss, but after a few months the productivity was better than Go thanks to Rust's functional features which make it extremely pleasant to write business logic, and the type system catching bugs during development instead of production. You can read more about the experience here: https://kerkour.c…

How much of a productivity boost would you’ve gotten from java or kotlin which provides a lot of those features with all the complexity and build times?

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#72

Post by sanxiyn »

ajross wrote: post #62
sanxiyn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, borrow checker's formal rules are rather simple. Here it is: It is an error to access a place, when an access conflicts with a loan, and the loan is live.

You're describing the desired behavior of the compiler, but not what it actually implements. In fact there are an infinite number of correct Rust programs which will never access memory incorrectly but which will still be rejected by the compiler, for the simple reason that Rust's authors, talented though they may be, have made no progress at all at solving the Halting Problem. What Rust actually accepts is a subset…

No, the rule I stated is what is actually implemented.

Like all type checking technology, the rule is about static behavior, not dynamic behavior. So halting problem is irrelevant.

Rust accepts all programs that follow the rule in static behavior. It's not a subset, and it's not a best effort to prove. It's the complete statement.

"Access" means source code construct to read or write. Rust doesn't care whether the construct is actually executed in runtime.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#73

Post by estebank »

ajross wrote: post #62
sanxiyn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, borrow checker's formal rules are rather simple. Here it is: It is an error to access a place, when an access conflicts with a loan, and the loan is live.

You're describing the desired behavior of the compiler, but not what it actually implements. In fact there are an infinite number of correct Rust programs which will never access memory incorrectly but which will still be rejected by the compiler, for the simple reason that Rust's authors, talented though they may be, have made no progress at all at solving the Halting Problem. What Rust actually accepts is a subset…

There are two problems here. Rust accepts a subset of correct programs that involve borrowing, that's absolutely true, but it gives you the tools to get around that: you either use Arc, where now you are in the same space that any refcounted GC language is in (with the extra flexibility that if you can "choose your guarantees"[1]), or use unsafe which lets you dereference memory freely in the same way that you would in C or C++.

The unstated problem is that there are patterns from other languages that are actually invalid and Rust is correctly denying, but not properly communicating it, which causes frustration. You can always make the argument that the failure modes are benign or rare, and for those cases noone is stopping you from actually using unsafe.

[1]: https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/27/wrapper-types-...

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#74

Post by Koshkin »

yagizdegirmenci wrote: post #58

> 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…

Well, it's like saying that wearing a straightjacket makes you a better person.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#75

Post by skohan »

ahelwer wrote: post #39
sanxiyn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

I would recommend asking questions on the subreddit. There's a standing thread for asking questions, and people usually give high-quality help and respond quickly

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#76

Post by pizza234 »

While I'm a big fan of Rust myself, there are a few points that lack rigour in this article (which are typical of "I love X" articles). Three points that struck me:

- rust-analyzer is good (as in: it's functional, it's advancing, etc.etc.), but it's alpha; it's not a tool that can be considered a mature tool of a mature language. I often encounter issues while working on projects.

- learning Rust is a serious problem IMHO, not only because it's hard in itself, but it's because it's hard to structure a plan to learn it. listing the reference book is indeed a misrepresentation: a complete beginner that reads the whole book will still have significant problems in working on a real project; it's very unclear which step to take after reading it, as real-world Rust programming needs exercise which is not tackled by any book. Things are made worse by a number of garbage books (Packt being very guilty of this) that pretend to teach programming in Rust by slapping a 20-pages chapter on the syntax and basic concepts.

- "for the vast majority of code I author, Rust feels more like Python than C": feelings are subjective, so I can't argue in an absolute sense, but the complexity of programming is very, very far from Python. In scripting languages like Python/Ruby one doesn't need to care about anything: memory allocation (which in itself, has many consequences, including on the program structure), data types, syntactic rigour, exact consistency of the program (in the sense: one can develop a half broken Python app, and it will stull run); all of these things are required in a statically typed language. Golang is probably a language that is closer to Python than C.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#77

Post by snake_case »

A few years back I chose Rust as the language I was going to build side projects with. I started out building a wasm A* pathfinding demo [1] to get a better hang of it.

A little bit later I wrote a CLI task runner [2] which is defined by a simple markdown file. I find Rust to be perfectly aligned with the goals of a CLI utility: single deployable binary and very low startup cost.

Most recently I launched a side project [3] (a jigsaw puzzle website) using Rust as my backend API service. I've been slowly building up a server framework over the years and finally was able to put it to use! Yes, it took me much longer to ship something in Rust versus other languages I'm more familiar with. But after learning Rust for a few years now, it doesn't take me much more time to build a feature than it would in another language.

Early on, I ran into a lot of borrower issues and got stuck many times. But after I got over those problems, I realized that for any future hurdles I would face, I just needed to keep pushing and eventually I would find a solution. I have found that with game development or heavily stateful apps, I tend to run into borrower issues more often. But for an API service with a simple input and output, I almost never run into borrower issues.

[1]: https://github.com/jakedeichert/wasm-astar

[2]: https://github.com/jakedeichert/mask

[3]: https://puzzlepanda.com

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#78

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

“Complexity is the enemy of execution.” - Tony Robbins

I don’t think Tony ever did any coding, but you’re right that it still applies here.

A google search shows complexity has many other enemies: security,reliability, agility, and progress itself.

In most cases I think this is right, use Go and simple tools whenever you can. There are cases where complexity is unavoidable though, like when you’re trying to land a rover in a precise location on Mars, where the sky crane makes sense, but don’t introduce the complexity when it’s unneeded.

Re: Rust is for Professionals

#79

Post by peppery-idiot »

sylvain_kerkour wrote: post #63
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…

As an indie developer, switching from Go to Rust for web APIs was extremely satisfying. At first there was a productivity loss, but after a few months the productivity was better than Go thanks to Rust's functional features which make it extremely pleasant to write business logic, and the type system catching bugs during development instead of production. You can read more about the experience here: https://kerkour.c…

For web work, are there benefits to using Rust over a garbage collected language that also benefits from a similar type system?
Post reply on HN