6 ms·

I don't use Rust, so pardon my ignorance, but my impression is that Rust will be very annoying if you're doing something that does not require safety. For exam

I don't use Rust, so pardon my ignorance, but my impression is that Rust will be very annoying if you're doing something that does not require safety. For example, these days I write a lot of data processing stuff that is closer to scripting than anything else, and is usually "one-offs" that get scrapped afterwards. But the code needs to be super fast, talk to databases, parallelize across multiple cores and nodes, which rules out many languages. On the other hand, safety is the absolute least concern. I've been using Ruby when it's not performance-sensitive, and Go when it is, and while Go is significantly less pleasant, it gives me decent performance, concurrency and access to libraries. Nim would probably also be ideal, if not for the lack of libraries. But Rust just seems like a terrible choice for this stuff because of the syntactical overhead of its abstractions, in particular memory. That limits its usefulness. A single language for all my work would reduce context switching and allow code reuse. In general, my impression is that Rust is good at the complex, heavy stuff, but it doesn't scale down.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "On the other hand, safety is the absolute least concern." In that case, you may be interested to know Rust permits unsafe code: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html
- onetwotree 11y ago
  Unsafe code isn't for things that "don't require safety". It's for things that are intrinsically unsafe, like calling foreign functions, and the unsafe keyword is basically saying "I promise to be very, very careful".
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Unsafe code in Rust is for anything the programmer wants to use it for. If someone is writing their own scripts (like the GP), and wants a strongly-typed system-level programming language, and has explicitly stated they care very little about safety, I see no reason why they couldn't use unsafe Rust code.
steveklabnik 11y ago
Don't forget that memory safety is the building block of a lot of other things, like safe concurrency: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht... "Safe by default" saves a lot of different kinds of bugs.
pcwalton 11y ago
Well, since you mentioned performance, the stuff I mentioned also buys you performance. Rust is in a category of language performance that GC'd languages with runtimes or JITs never reach in practice. I don't believe Go will be an exception to this (especially not now, with its lack of an optimizing compiler). In general, I think if you're looking for "one language to rule them all", that can scale up to the highest performance and down to one-off apps you would write in Rails, you will be disappointed. Even if you don't care about safety. That's because, no matter what people say, static and dynamic typing is a tradeoff. Rust is more statically typed than Go is. Go is more statically typed than Ruby is. Which you should use depends on your circumstances. A lot of language designers and enthusiasts, from all communities, believe there's a "sweet spot" of language design where your language can scale up or down at will. I don't believe it. That experiment was tried with Lisp and Java and failed. Multiple languages are here to stay. At the end of the day, all I can say is: If you're happy with Go, use Go. Rust was never designed with all use cases in mind, and I don't see that fact as a failure at all. I see it as just acknowledging reality: trying to make a language that scales up and down indefinitely to all use cases is chasing the impossible, and language enthusiasts who believe their language is the one language that can do that are all mistaken.
- Gankro 11y ago
  From what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that over the past 8 years of development all usecases, features, and syntaxes were indeed kept in mind for at least some amount of time. Not all of them made it into the final design, though. ;)
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  But Nim shows that it's possible to have a fast, statically typed language that is also terse and lean and "script-like". I actually do believe there exists a sweet spot. I just think that during design, too little thought it given to the scalability of languages. And I don't think it's that difficult. For example, type inference is something of a game-changer, capable of making a statically typed language feel nearly like a dynamic one. Yet it's only recently being applied in mainstream languages, despite the theory not being particularly new. I also think too little thought it given to the cognitive overhead of syntax. Wirth famously designed his grammars to fit on a single screen. Go (which, like its earlier incarnations Alef, Limbo and Newsqueak, is very much influenced by Wirth) gets this syntactical simplicity right. I thought early Rust syntax showed a lot of promise, but I'm unhappy about the current jungle::of::punctuation. > If you're happy with Go, use Go. To be clear, I'm not happy with Go.
viperscape 11y ago
there is some work happening in the node+rust arena that's interesting in this regard

ZenoArrow 11y ago

> "On the other hand, safety is the absolute least concern." In that case, you may be interested to know Rust permits unsafe code: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html

onetwotree 11y ago
Unsafe code isn't for things that "don't require safety". It's for things that are intrinsically unsafe, like calling foreign functions, and the unsafe keyword is basically saying "I promise to be very, very careful".
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Unsafe code in Rust is for anything the programmer wants to use it for. If someone is writing their own scripts (like the GP), and wants a strongly-typed system-level programming language, and has explicitly stated they care very little about safety, I see no reason why they couldn't use unsafe Rust code.

steveklabnik 11y ago

Don't forget that memory safety is the building block of a lot of other things, like safe concurrency: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht... "Safe by default" saves a lot of different kinds of bugs.

pcwalton 11y ago

Well, since you mentioned performance, the stuff I mentioned also buys you performance. Rust is in a category of language performance that GC'd languages with runtimes or JITs never reach in practice. I don't believe Go will be an exception to this (especially not now, with its lack of an optimizing compiler). In general, I think if you're looking for "one language to rule them all", that can scale up to the highest performance and down to one-off apps you would write in Rails, you will be disappointed. Even if you don't care about safety. That's because, no matter what people say, static and dynamic typing is a tradeoff. Rust is more statically typed than Go is. Go is more statically typed than Ruby is. Which you should use depends on your circumstances. A lot of language designers and enthusiasts, from all communities, believe there's a "sweet spot" of language design where your language can scale up or down at will. I don't believe it. That experiment was tried with Lisp and Java and failed. Multiple languages are here to stay. At the end of the day, all I can say is: If you're happy with Go, use Go. Rust was never designed with all use cases in mind, and I don't see that fact as a failure at all. I see it as just acknowledging reality: trying to make a language that scales up and down indefinitely to all use cases is chasing the impossible, and language enthusiasts who believe their language is the one language that can do that are all mistaken.

Gankro 11y ago
From what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that over the past 8 years of development all usecases, features, and syntaxes were indeed kept in mind for at least some amount of time. Not all of them made it into the final design, though. ;)
lobster_johnson 11y ago
But Nim shows that it's possible to have a fast, statically typed language that is also terse and lean and "script-like". I actually do believe there exists a sweet spot. I just think that during design, too little thought it given to the scalability of languages. And I don't think it's that difficult. For example, type inference is something of a game-changer, capable of making a statically typed language feel nearly like a dynamic one. Yet it's only recently being applied in mainstream languages, despite the theory not being particularly new. I also think too little thought it given to the cognitive overhead of syntax. Wirth famously designed his grammars to fit on a single screen. Go (which, like its earlier incarnations Alef, Limbo and Newsqueak, is very much influenced by Wirth) gets this syntactical simplicity right. I thought early Rust syntax showed a lot of promise, but I'm unhappy about the current jungle::of::punctuation. > If you're happy with Go, use Go. To be clear, I'm not happy with Go.

viperscape 11y ago

there is some work happening in the node+rust arena that's interesting in this regard