A Rust shaped hole
mnvr.in
A Rust shaped hole
1–10 of 319 posts
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#2Someone really needs to show Nim to the author :). It checks all of their boxes and then some
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#3> While I can jump through hoops to compile JavaScript into a binary, such wouldn't feel "solid". And the very point of writing a native program in the first place is to make it feel solid
You can use Bun to compile to native binaries without jumping through hoops. It's not mature, but it works well enough that we use it at work.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#4I write Gleam for this. A rust like language on the erlang VM. It's neat, but not widely used.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#5I write Gleam for this. A rust like language on the erlang VM. It's neat, but not widely used.
I have been wanting to use Gleam more, but I havent found the right project or time. I can prototype drastically easier using Python.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#6The table in the end sums it up nicely.
Rust allows low level programming and static compilation, while still providing abstraction and safety. A good ecosystem and stable build tools help massively as well.
It is one of the few languages which managed to address a real life need in novel ways, rather than incrementing on existing solutions and introducing new trade offs.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#7>To paraphrase Norvig's Latency numbers a programmer should know, if we imagine a computer that executes 1 CPU instruction every second, it would take it days to read from RAM.
It's a detail, but this is a little bit off. RAM latency is roughly around ~100ns, CPUs average a couple instructions per cycle and a few cycles per ns.
Then in the analogy, a stall on RAM is about a 10 minute wait; not quite as bad as losing entire days.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#8This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though.
For the other 10% software that is performance-sensitive or where I need to ship some binary, I haven't found a language that I'm "happy" with. Just like the author talks about, I basically bounce between Go and Rust depending on what it is. Go is too simple almost to a fault (give me type unions please). Rust is too expressive; I find myself debugging my knowledge of Rust rather than the program (also I think metaprogramming/macros are a mistake).
I think there's space in the programming language world for a slightly higher level Go-like language with more expressiveness.
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#9I don't think you need an elaborate process of elimination when one of your axioms is "must manage memory manually".
Re: A Rust shaped hole
#10> While I can jump through hoops to compile JavaScript into a binary, such wouldn't feel "solid". And the very point of writing a native program in the first place is to make it feel solid You can use Bun to compile to native binaries without jumping through hoops. It's not mature, but it works well enough that we use it at work.
It's definitely nice for certain use cases. I just wish the binaries weren't so huge (~60MB + your actual source code).