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

Rust needs a web framework

ntietz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 395 posts

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#81

Post by chowells »

bsnnkv wrote: post #64

So strange reading all the comments here saying that Rust is not a language for "lazy developers". I'm an incredibly lazy developer and Rust only makes me lazier. I can pretty much turn off the part of my brain that deals with "programming language" stuff and put all that energy towards the part of my brain that deals with "building stuff" whenever I write code in Rust, because I have a high level of confidence that…

Some people are comfortable offloading mental effort to a compiler. Others suffer from anxiety at the suggestion.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#82

Post by angra_mainyu »

dougthesnails wrote: post #62

Take F# for a spin. It offers nearly all of the type system tomfoolery one craves and all the tooling and nice-to-haves one wants. The big drag is that the async story and memory management aren't as big as a time vampire as Rust, so you do run the risk of actually solving business needs. I am sure some part of dealing with Microsoft can fill that void, though.

I've been on the fence w.r.t giving it a try. How does it compare to Ocaml and haskell?

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#83

Post by tkzed49 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #71
creatonez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer for why folks are so inclined towards doing high-level tasks in Rust... is the type system. Its sensibilities are in a sweet spot that makes it very easy to pull off huge refactors. It was also a lot of people's first introduction to algebraic data types being used in nearly all error handling (its usage of `Result where E implements Error` and lack of nulls or exceptions). It makes a lot of progress towar…

Typing in modern days is effectively moving the task of debugging to compile/ide annotations process instead of testing for correctness. Albeit it makes the process easier compared to a really shittly written code without strict typing, but against good codebases, it takes the same amount of time.

I strongly disagree on the principle that tests and types have a 100% overlap in the problems they're solving.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#84

Post by throw10920 »

bsnnkv wrote: post #64

So strange reading all the comments here saying that Rust is not a language for "lazy developers". I'm an incredibly lazy developer and Rust only makes me lazier. I can pretty much turn off the part of my brain that deals with "programming language" stuff and put all that energy towards the part of my brain that deals with "building stuff" whenever I write code in Rust, because I have a high level of confidence that…

> I'm an incredibly lazy developer and Rust only makes me lazier

You can't be that lazy, or you would use a language that doesn't force you to do memory management.

> Rust is the only language where I can open something like Notepad without an LSP or highlighting

This is a very weird and arbitrary qualifier that seems designed to filter out other languages with type systems.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#85

Post by throw10920 »

p1necone wrote: post #20
elAhmo wrote: post #18

Rust is not for lazy developers and there are other languages if you want to put minimal effort in building things.

I'm a lazy developer and I love languages with an "if it compiles it works" feel. I'd much rather hack around in rust or typescript with half my brain switched off and a beer in hand and eventually get working software than hack around in javascript with half my brain switched off and a beer in hand and get more and more broken software until I eventually give up.

I don't think the dichotomy is between types and not-types - it's between Rust and other typed languages.

Most people here appear to agree that types are useful, but some people are claiming that a language that forces you to do memory management is somehow as ergonomic/lazy as others that manage memory for you (with equivalently good type systems - TypeScript, ~Python).

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#86

Post by paulgb »

oguz-ismail wrote: post #75
paulgb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is clearly building things for the joy of it. If she gets the most joy from Rust, that's what she should use! > See, if I want to make something for the web, I could use Django but I don't want that. I mean, Django is for building serious businesses, not for building silly non-commercial things! Personally, I spent the first decade of my career switching between languages, believing that I should use the b…

[flagged]

Yes?

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#87

Post by troad »

devjab wrote: post #10

> I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust… I think this part is perhaps the silliest part of a very silly article. If you really like to put in a minimal effort then why on earth would you use Rust? If you want efficiency, memory management and a compiled modern language just use Go. Then you won’t even need anything but the stan…

I am a fan of Rust for systems programming, but so many people are using Rust for things that are nothing even remotely close to systems programming. So many projects you see being written (or rewritten) in Rust are projects where I just think 'wait, why can't this just have a GC'? And then you look at the code base, and it's all Arc>s, and you can't help at marvel at this, since that's just GC, so what's the benefit of Rust here, exactly? (Don't @ me, ARC is GC.)

I think a lot of what people actually like about Rust, to be honest, is that it's essentially an ML language masquerading as a C-like, with a stellar packaging and tooling story. What people fall in love with is the rigorous static typing, the Option monad, the exhaustive enums (which are just sum types in disguise), the traits (type classes in disguise), the borrow checker (a half-way house to immutability) etc. People will brag about Rust's memory safety, and then you find out that they don't really know how lifetimes work, they just .clone() or Arc> everything. Which is totally valid, but Rust is hardly necessary for that.

Rust is great, but - heretic idea - not literally everything needs to be in Rust. Go try Ruby on Rails for a while! Or - if Rust has whetted your appetite for more functional styles - Phoenix on Elixir! Yes, it's not quite so blazing fast, but - let's be honest here - you're not going to be getting billions of requests per second on your hobby website where you write about taking apart Amigas. It's OK! She'll be right.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#88

Post by kelnos »

elcritch wrote: post #72
wongarsu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definetly something the article should have drilled down on. Why Rust? I'm sure everyone's tired of hearing why rust is an excellent alternative to c/c++ for new projects, but as an alternative against Python it gets muddier. Rust has a clear advantage in performance and memory footprint and a much better multithreading story, but those are things that aren't high priorities for 95% of web development. That b…

> and if we pretend we can't hear the Haskell developers it's one of the best type systems out there Eh, Rust's type system isn't one of the best out there. It's lacking higher kinded types, etc. It's abilities in type level programming are frustratingly limited as well. So it's advanced aside from from Haskell, OCaml, Idris, Scala, etc. Compare to OCaml's effect system for an advanced type system feature.

I 100% agree with you (I really miss HKTs), but I don't think the GP was using "best" to mean "most fully-featured".

And with that in mind, I do agree with the GP. Scala's type system, for example, is full of warts (well, Scala 2; I still haven't tried Scala 3). Rust's is cleaner and has fewer gotchas. I very rarely have to look up how to express something in Rust's type system, but I remember when I last did Scala, I often ran into weird type-system related errors that I just didn't understand and had to dig into to figure out. Some of that, sure, is likely due to Scala's type system having more features, but some of that is because it's just more complex. And I would usually rate something of lower complexity as better than something with higher complexity.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#89

Post by kelnos »

lovethevoid wrote: post #39
phoronixrly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of logic is this... The Rust language is quite rigorous, so web frameworks on it should also be equally laborious to work with? You have to roll your own authentication, you have to do your own routing, you have to do ad-hoc string manipulation instead of templates?... The person likes writing in Rust, and would like to have a batteries-included web framework so they can tie together a web app quickly on th…

If you find the language rigorous, a web framework can't magically do away with that. It's genuinely illogical to believe so. There are plenty of web frameworks on Rust that are quite nice to use, but they are still Rust, with all its shortcomings in the same way Django is still Python with all its shortcomings. What you're asking for is a DSL built on top of Rust for the purpose of creating web apps.

I mean, OP is working on such a "magical" web framework now. Time will tell how it turns out, and how usable and magical it ends up being. But at least the author isn't just whining; she's put her hands to the keyboard and is going to try to get it done.

> What you're asking for is a DSL built on top of Rust for the purpose of creating web apps.

I don't think that's necessary, personally, but if someone really wanted that, I'm sure they could come up with something that can be wrapped in a Rust macro invocation, that gets expanded to something smaller and faster (compiled-code-wise) than anything you can get in a Rails app.

Re: Rust needs a web framework

#90

Post by kelnos »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #27
devjab wrote: post #10

> I like to make silly things, and I also like to put in minimal effort for those silly things. I also like to make things in Rust… I think this part is perhaps the silliest part of a very silly article. If you really like to put in a minimal effort then why on earth would you use Rust? If you want efficiency, memory management and a compiled modern language just use Go. Then you won’t even need anything but the stan…

> I also like to make things in Rust Seems like a good enough reason to use it to me, but perhaps I’m just another cult member. > we use Rust in production because we thought it would be easier (well safer) to teach to interpreted language OOP developers than c/c++ I think rust is just safer period, regardless of your level of expertise or background. Or are you saying that every memory safety bug was written in by s…

> I think rust is just safer period, regardless of your level of expertise or background. Or are you saying that every memory safety bug was written in by someone inexperienced?

I think you're reading too much into that and creating conflict where there isn't any. GP just meant that they had a bunch of interpreted language OOP developers (probably Java or C# or something like that), and they wanted them to start writing code in an AOT-compiled language (yes, I know about Graal native image; not the point). And that teaching them Rust is probably going to result in safer code than if they were to teach them C or C++.

That shouldn't be a controversial statement.

Post reply on HN