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Why is Rust difficult?

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Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#91

Post by bonesss »

pjmlp wrote: post #65
bonesss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like the compiler was my teacher, and it kept on teaching me new concepts to look up in the docs. I work primarily in F#, a functional .Net language, which also enforces strict rules at compile time to ensure correctness... With the benefit of experience it's amazing and comforting and lets you reason happily about applications at a higher level. It's on of my favorite parts of the language, TBH. And while I…

F# is nice, if only Microsoft would actually provide feature parity with C#, VB.NET and C++ tools. I bet C# will sooner copy F# features than Blend, GUI designers or .NET Native will support F#.

That response is kinda offtopic for Rust... but:

F# is a first class .Net language that interops rather well with the others... If you have some burning need to use Blend or a GUI designer then you can always have a C# shim feeding into an F# domain/core with little problem. It's the same interop story as VB.Net, fundamentally.

That said: if you track MS's track-record those technologies and their Enterprise market viability, outside of resume-driven-development there isn't a lot of reason to be throwing hard money at their new shiney shiney... C# lags drastically behind F# in areas not focused on the client: scientific computing, cloud computing, parallel computing, agent/actor systems, etc... Being a release cycle off on the coolest new drag-n-drop tooling from MS is a moderating influence that has created a much better cross-platform story, and OSS story, for F# than C# has ever achieved, despite the scale difference.

Oh, and C# has been actively trying to copy F# for many release cycles, including reworking basic language design decisions... It is, however, fundamentally unable to achieve that goal based on the languages overriding design. I'm impressed they're back-working non-nullable value objects, for example, but the language can't give guarantees that ML languages can. Pattern matching is nice, but exhaustive pattern matching is what you want for hard things, IoW. And those deficiencies make C# a non-starter or also-ran for a lot of the BigData, streaming, cross-platform systems you see in big data halls and scientific computing.

It's almost like different tools are good for different things ;)

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#92

Post by coldtea »

vlovich123 wrote: post #82
jchw wrote: post #37

I like Rust so far, but there's a few things I think aren't true: * That Rust is only harder because it enforces 'correctness.' It certainly is harder because it enforces correctness, but it's also harder because of how . I'm not saying there's a better approach to this, but I think a lot of people are implying that there isn't, and I don't think that's a safe assumption. I think that we could find ways to make equal…

You make some good points but I think it's incorrect to compare Rust & Go. Rust is a systems programming language. It competes with C/C++ more than other high-level languages. In fact, while Go was originally positioned as a systems language but it ended up attracting people from scripting languages like Python because its performance characteristics put it there. You'd probably never bother building a serious web br…

>In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues, except in so far as those caused by memory/concurrency - think of it as necessary but not sufficient for security.

Huh? Those might not be sufficient, but are the source of 99% of security issues.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#93

Post by pjmlp »

dullgiulio wrote: post #85
josephg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go is another programming language I like, ... Fearless concurrency is a wonderful feature, but for embarrassingly parallel problems Go works wonderfully. I adore Go's concurrency model but loathe go's actual language. The constant repetition in error handling, lack of generics and lack of parameterised types and Option make it feel like a children's toy set version of C instead of a useful modern language akin to…

I do hope it's not true that people from the community would attack you for writing a compile-to-go language. I don't think it's such a bad idea, considering how stable the language itself is, it's a pretty solid bet.

Spend some time on golang-nuts, proposing ideas from "languages for academics".

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#94

Post by timClicks »

majewsky wrote: post #87
vlovich123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some good points but I think it's incorrect to compare Rust & Go. Rust is a systems programming language. It competes with C/C++ more than other high-level languages. In fact, while Go was originally positioned as a systems language but it ended up attracting people from scripting languages like Python because its performance characteristics put it there. You'd probably never bother building a serious web br…

> In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues I would argue that the rest of your paragraph talks about how Rust (indirectly) improves security issues. > As for compiler errors not helping you understand the problem, I have yet to encounter a compiler that does that. Try misplacing a { in an average LaTeX document. But don't say that you haven't been warned. ;) Alternatively, writ…

rustfmt https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#95

Post by DougBTX »

majewsky wrote: post #87
vlovich123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some good points but I think it's incorrect to compare Rust & Go. Rust is a systems programming language. It competes with C/C++ more than other high-level languages. In fact, while Go was originally positioned as a systems language but it ended up attracting people from scripting languages like Python because its performance characteristics put it there. You'd probably never bother building a serious web br…

> In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues I would argue that the rest of your paragraph talks about how Rust (indirectly) improves security issues. > As for compiler errors not helping you understand the problem, I have yet to encounter a compiler that does that. Try misplacing a { in an average LaTeX document. But don't say that you haven't been warned. ;) Alternatively, writ…

There is rustfmt https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt though it is a work in progress: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/fmt-rfcs

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#96

Post by bonesss »

carlmr wrote: post #72
bonesss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like the compiler was my teacher, and it kept on teaching me new concepts to look up in the docs. I work primarily in F#, a functional .Net language, which also enforces strict rules at compile time to ensure correctness... With the benefit of experience it's amazing and comforting and lets you reason happily about applications at a higher level. It's on of my favorite parts of the language, TBH. And while I…

I went to F# from C#, but I felt the transition was easier than going from C to Rust. I kind of noticed that I used some functional concepts a lot in my C# anyway. I always liked side-effect free functions, I tended to do a lot with LINQ transformations already, etc. F# made a lot of these things nicer to use (+ pattern matching + discriminated unions +++)

The two languages are approaching a superficial parity, as C# eats up more and more functional concepts. I find it interesting, too, because many of the arguments about things being 'too hard' compared to C# make no sense when those concepts are baseline knowledge in both languages. The positive parts of the functional approach will make code more solid in any language, and C# is working hard to support that approach :)

I've got over a decades C# experience, and it's readily one of my favorite pragmatic languages for real-world work. MS has done an exemplary job of actively and aggressively improving the language. That said: barring the sole use case of trying hot-new-tech from microsoft, I never pick it up anymore... My F# code is always more concise, smaller, more robust, and provides execution guarantees that save me metric buttloads of work and testing. The scripting support kills any need for those Python utility scripts. Type providers give structural guarantees to handling external data, and proper use of Discriminated Unions empowers meaningful domain modelling better than anything I've seen.

It's also unusual to me, with... well... a dogs age in the industry, to find myself compelled to open up projects from 6+ months ago just to stare at how deeply pretty some of my algorithms are. So pretty that if git didn't blame me, I'd have to conclude someone else wrote them ;)

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#97

Post by aplanas »

majewsky wrote: post #87
vlovich123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some good points but I think it's incorrect to compare Rust & Go. Rust is a systems programming language. It competes with C/C++ more than other high-level languages. In fact, while Go was originally positioned as a systems language but it ended up attracting people from scripting languages like Python because its performance characteristics put it there. You'd probably never bother building a serious web br…

> In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues I would argue that the rest of your paragraph talks about how Rust (indirectly) improves security issues. > As for compiler errors not helping you understand the problem, I have yet to encounter a compiler that does that. Try misplacing a { in an average LaTeX document. But don't say that you haven't been warned. ;) Alternatively, writ…

> Is there a standard tool-enforced coding style for Rust that the community agrees on, in the same way that the Go community has by and large agreed on gofmt?

https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustfmt

And is planned to be distributed with the compiler and the cargo stack by default

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#98

Post by majewsky »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #16
stmw wrote: post #2

Good article, although there are also some unforced errors of what Rust community calls "ergonomics" - many of which have been addressed, and hopefully many others will be soon - that make things more difficult to learn than the absolutely have to be. But author is quite correct that some things are just hard, and if a language is being "honest", it must expose them to the user.

What we could do better than we do today - and your comment about ergonomics alludes to our work to improve this - is ease the onboarding of that complexity we have to be "honest" about. Its a design constraint of Rust that it must maximize user control, but that does not imply that users have to be faced with all of those choices as soon as they first try to write Rust. In some respects I think this article is an at…

I would like a language that has knobs (e.g. file-level pragmas) for strictness, which you could turn all to one side (to get something as strict as Rust) or all the way to the other side (to get something like Ruby) or somewhere in between.

For example, a REPL would be pretty non-strict: When you define a function, you don't have to annotate types on the arguments, and everything gets passed around as generic objects. However, the standard library would be pretty strict [1], so in your unstrict REPL code, types are checked (and implicit clones are made to satisfy the borrow checker) as soon as you call into the strict code.

[1] In fact, the package repository for this hypothetical language (the analog to crates.io etc.) should only accept strict code, or alternatively put HUGE warning signs on libraries that contain unstrict code.

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#99

Post by majewsky »

bitL wrote: post #29
kumarvvr wrote: post #13

After years of using Python, it's been difficult to wrap my head around GO and Rust. I really wish there was a course on Rust / Go for python programmers.

Go is IMO much simpler than Rust.

Definitely. I got my first Go program from zero to prod in about a week, where "zero" is the point where I started the tutorial (the "tour" on golang.org).

Re: Why is Rust difficult?

#100

Post by majewsky »

titanix2 wrote: post #38
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14

Is there a way to avoid the true-believer syndrome for Rust? I want to embrace Rust, but everyone ~100% of the time comes away chanting about how awesome Rust is. So much so that it's a bit unsettling. Zealotry in general is bad, but especially in programming: once you identify as an X programmer, you lose out on ideas from Y and Z. Every tool has its flaws, but for whatever reason it seems extremely rare to discuss…

This is the exact reason I won’t learn Rust past looking quickly the doc: the promotion made by some very vocal people is a huge turn off. Notably by saying that everything must be rewritten in Rust, it implies that every other language is sh*t and people using them are dumb. Of course I don’t like that view for my work nor I won’t to be associated with this kind of people. This is a bit sad because the language prob…

> every other language is sh*t

Looking at how many CVEs are caused by undefined behavior and insecure properties of C, there is merit to the claim that Rust is objectively better than C in the strictness department and if safety/security is a major concern to you, you should absolutely choose Rust over C in new projects.

As for rewriting existing C software in Rust, the usual caveats for rewrites apply. Decades-old software like coreutils has had many eyes on the code, so the chance of catastrophic bugs decreases over time (but never to zero).

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