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I think that line of thinking ends up not applying to rust terribly much. I know there's been several articles lately about broader applications of rust, and t

by jamwt 11y ago

I think that line of thinking ends up not applying to rust terribly much. I know there's been several articles lately about broader applications of rust, and then "is it worth it?" type responses, concerns about "manual memory management", with the implication being there's some heavy tax on not using a GC. I would certainly agree with the presence of this tax while writing C/C++. (Less with C++, RAII, and especially c++11, but still there.) With rust, once you're up the learning curve (which, granted, can take a few months), your productivity is not substantially worse than GC'd languages. You pretty much master the borrow checker's semantics, and the best practices to structure things in ways that play nicely with its expectations. And lifetime-related errors don't occupy all that much of your development time. Source: my team has been re-writing some components of Dropbox's multi-exabyte storage system in rust (from go) over the last 9 months.

pjungwir 11y ago
I am fascinated that no one uses Objective C on the back end. Fast, low memory, quick to code in, high-level-enough, a mix of static and dynamic typing, and no garbage collection. Also plenty of expertise you can hire for, maybe already within your company. I think if Obj C had a good story for deploying on Linux (and not losing modern features like ARC), it would make sense to use it, so we'd see sites doing it and open source tools like a good webapp framework. It is because you would need to run OS X servers? (And is that even true?)
- the-kenny 11y ago
  I think being so heavily pushed by Apple is actually a downside for ObjC here. I really enjoyed programming ObjC when I was programming for iOS and Mac. That was mostly because of the very rich API shipped with Apple products. Can you point me to a list of libraries written in ObjC that work without Apple specific code? (E.g. without using anything starting with 'NS')
  - mpvl 11y ago
    Gnustep
    - pjungwir 11y ago
      I'm aware of Gnustep, so I was hoping someone would mention it. But I was hoping for more than one word. How many people are using it in production? Have they had good experiences or bad? What are the surprises they've encountered? Does it have ARC support? Can I use XCode to build with it?
acconsta 11y ago
That might make you the biggest company using Rust? Very cool, I hope you write it up.

by jamwt 11y ago

pjungwir 11y ago

I am fascinated that no one uses Objective C on the back end. Fast, low memory, quick to code in, high-level-enough, a mix of static and dynamic typing, and no garbage collection. Also plenty of expertise you can hire for, maybe already within your company. I think if Obj C had a good story for deploying on Linux (and not losing modern features like ARC), it would make sense to use it, so we'd see sites doing it and open source tools like a good webapp framework. It is because you would need to run OS X servers? (And is that even true?)

the-kenny 11y ago
I think being so heavily pushed by Apple is actually a downside for ObjC here. I really enjoyed programming ObjC when I was programming for iOS and Mac. That was mostly because of the very rich API shipped with Apple products. Can you point me to a list of libraries written in ObjC that work without Apple specific code? (E.g. without using anything starting with 'NS')
- mpvl 11y ago
  Gnustep
  - pjungwir 11y ago
    I'm aware of Gnustep, so I was hoping someone would mention it. But I was hoping for more than one word. How many people are using it in production? Have they had good experiences or bad? What are the surprises they've encountered? Does it have ARC support? Can I use XCode to build with it?

acconsta 11y ago

That might make you the biggest company using Rust? Very cool, I hope you write it up.