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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#81

Post by Xeamek »

Zagitta wrote: post #37

"Programming in Rust is like being in an emotionally abusive relationship. Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life. Eventually, you get used to the tantrums. They become routine. You learn to walk the tightrope to avoid triggering the compiler’s temper. And just like in real life, those behavior changes stick with you forever." This is…

>From my perspective every lifetime complaint the compiler has is a deeply appreciated hint that not only saves you countless hours of debugging down the line but also makes me feel confident/safe in the code

Meh, the fact that Rust's compiler is overly strict is just a truth (All compiling programs are valid, but not all valid programs are compiling), and I find it lowkey annoying that every time someone has a problem with it, rustceans jump to the defense to the point of almost denying the OPs experience. I mean on a case by case basis it might simply be a difference of experiences and both are valid, but on a larger scale it does look like a bit of a pattern, at least to me.

Ofcourse, there restrictions aren't just a whim of a Rust core team (usually ;p ), and do come from practical limitations but regardless, it's fair to be frustrated at them.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#82

Post by sunshowers »

bogwog wrote: post #53

Do you need memory safety? Then why use Rust when you could use Java, JS, Python, etc? You can't "disable" memory safety in those languages. Do you need bare metal performance? Then why use Rust when you could use C or C++, which have much larger ecosystems, platform support, more mature tooling, etc. Do you need BOTH memory safety and baremetal performance at the same time? Then there really aren't many other option…

A full 70% of security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues. As professionals we need to get serious and have memory safety as a baseline requirement.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#83

Post by subarctic »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #25

As an outsider, I often hear about async Rust being less than ideal. Perhaps I don't understand, because I haven't dipped my toes in the water yet... but I do most of my work in Kotlin with Coroutines, and concurrency is everywhere in the UI. I can't imagine working in a language having a major deficit in this space. Are there any efforts to overhaul or completely rethink this?

There's efforts to overhaul it, basically there's a lot of stuff that has to be more complicated (as you'd expect) if you want to add support for async somewhere, and understanding the error messages can be pretty mentally taxing when you get it wrong; and then there's a lot of cases where the async version of some pattern just doesn't work right now due to limitations in the compiler or the language itself, and hopefully it'll work someday, but in the meantime you need to use workarounds.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#84

Post by dilippkumar »

> After two decades of JavaScript and decent experience with Go, this is the most significant source of frustration and friction with Rust. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but you must always be ready to deal with the async monster when it rears its head. In other languages, async is almost invisible.

I am a former C and C++ programmer who lived calling into pthread almost every week for a decade. I use async rust everywhere now.

I don’t get the hate that async gets. In my opinion, everyone should be using async for everything. Including stuff that’s seemingly single threaded “simple” stuff.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#85

Post by _aavaa_ »

willsmith72 wrote: post #68
Analemma_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but a little quip I've used when talking about developing in Rust vs. other languages is, it's a question of where/when do you want the pain. In Rust, it's at development time (and hiring and ramp-up time); in C++ it's at runtime; and with GC languages it's at billing time when you have to pay for that extra compute and RAM. There's no way to get rid of the pain entirely.

if it were that simple, I'd take the "billing time" payment every time. Engineers' time is the greatest cost for just about any tech business

And yet the big tech companies are perpetually re-writing their whole stack, or going out of their way to create new compilers for their language in order to lower their billing time.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#86

Post by fbdab103 »

scrollaway wrote: post #77
willsmith72 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it were that simple, I'd take the "billing time" payment every time. Engineers' time is the greatest cost for just about any tech business

Sometimes billing time is your customer's patience, their phone battery, or other things like that which make your product worse and give your competitors an edge.

>...which make your product worse and give your competitors an edge

I would find that argument passable if some of the biggest products from the largest companies functioned better. Performant software seems like a distant memory.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#87

Post by subarctic »

adastra22 wrote: post #43
clumsysmurf wrote: post #25

As an outsider, I often hear about async Rust being less than ideal. Perhaps I don't understand, because I haven't dipped my toes in the water yet... but I do most of my work in Kotlin with Coroutines, and concurrency is everywhere in the UI. I can't imagine working in a language having a major deficit in this space. Are there any efforts to overhaul or completely rethink this?

It’s pretty much the same issue all languages have, that async functions are colored. I don’t think it is unique to rust. Algebraic effects would solve this, but I don’t know any language other than OCaml that is working on that approach.

I mean... that's not really the pain that people are referring to when they are struggling with async Rust, especially when you compare it other languages like JavaScript that also have a difference between async and regular functions.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#88

Post by cdelsolar »

starttoaster wrote: post #56
treyd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the horrible decision to not make library-level ("module") and code-unit-level ("package") namespacing orthogonal. The former was an afterthought tacked on since the package system was designed to be used only within Google's monorepo and little care was paid to how it would work when it was released to the public and used more generally.

I want to understand what you just said, but I fear watering your language down a bit might be a tall ask with some people. Would you be willing to eli5 what you believe Go did that was a horrible decision with regards to module/package namespacing?

I think he wants them to be treated differently for some reason.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#89

Post by oivey »

Zagitta wrote: post #37

"Programming in Rust is like being in an emotionally abusive relationship. Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life. Eventually, you get used to the tantrums. They become routine. You learn to walk the tightrope to avoid triggering the compiler’s temper. And just like in real life, those behavior changes stick with you forever." This is…

Did you mean non-GC languages? GC languages by default have at least memory safety because the GC frees for you when an object is detected to no longer be accessible.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#90

Post by Someone1234 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #73

"Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life." A good C compiler does this when you turn on all the flags. I like languages/compilers that let you selectively disable the screaming and let you write bad code on purpose. Bad code that works but can be written fast is often better than perfect code that takes forever to write. Once you have…

> A good C compiler does this when you turn on all the flags. I like languages/compilers that let you selectively disable the screaming and let you write bad code on purpose. Bad code that works but can be written fast is often better than perfect code that takes forever to write. Once you have a bad but working POC, you can make it less bad.

Rust supports that. Just mark everything unsafe.

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