4 ms·

I wrote a fair bit of go at my old job and I just finished a small internal rust utility at my current job. i liked go at first but then got completely fed up w

I wrote a fair bit of go at my old job and I just finished a small internal rust utility at my current job. i liked go at first but then got completely fed up with the error handling, the module/folder nonsense, having to define the same function over and over for different primitive types when it came up, and nil. so I picked up rust. it's miles better. the syntax is not as bad you imagine - my utility is about 1000 lines and there are no lifetime parameters anywhere. the functional stuff is clean (closures, iterators, match). there are real enums (none of that iota nonsense) which as a "mature" developer have become integral to the design of any system for me. writing macros is easy (basically just like code gen in go). the borrow checker isn't that hard to satisfy - only one thing was a head scratcher and #rust-beginner helped me out there. cargo is great and so is RLS. there are a surprisingly large number of libraries given how young the language is (fewer than go for sure but enough that I didn't have to implement anything tedious myself). I mean it's just an all around pleasant experience and you're guaranteed to be writing performant (zero cost abstractions) safe code. how can you beat that? the only thing I miss from go are goroutines and the lightning fast compiler (but the rust compiler is plenty fast for how much it does). so I will probably use rust for everything other than what's fit for a python script from now on.

pierrec 8y ago
>you're guaranteed to be writing performant safe code Let's not get overboard here
- mlevental 8y ago
  edited to clarify with zero cost abstraction
Nokinside 8y ago
> and you're guaranteed to be writing performant safe code That's very far from truth.
- mlevental 8y ago
  There's a term that's thrown around on Reddit that I think is appropriate here (since you're the second person to make basically this same comment): shitposting. If you have a meaningful contribution to conversation (e.g. you can enlighten us to instances where rust compiles down to inefficient or unsafe code) then make it. Otherwise don't say anything.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    >If you have a meaningful contribution to conversation (e.g. you can enlighten us to instances where rust compiles down to inefficient or unsafe code) then make it. This should be applied to your original unsubstantiated claim. Rust has some features that improve safety. Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.
    - bluejekyll 8y ago
      I’m not sure what you mean by this: “Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.” I mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. Perhaps you mean that Rust has unsafe, which allows you to write unsafe code in Rust. But technically that term is reserved for the developer to make a claim that though the compiler can’t determine the safety of this code, the developer is claiming it is safe. Then there is safe Rust, if you write safe Rust, the guarantees that the program output is safe are pretty high. Given that no software is devoid of bugs, it’s obviously not 100%. So do you have a specific argument your making about why Rust is not safe? Or is it a general comment about software? Edit: I suppose you could be pedantic in that rustc doesn’t generate code, but technically it does, mir and then llvmir. That code then gets compiled to platform specific binaries.
      - Nokinside 8y ago
        > mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. I have been writing safety critical code for living, so I think that saying that code "is safe" because it is written in some language is categorical error (not just error of degree) unless it is a language enables formally proofing correctness. You can take fundamentally unsafe language like C. Restrict to subset of it MISRA C and use external static code analysis like Astree that that uses abstract interpretation to prove that there are no run time errors: no memory errors, no division of zero erros, no out-of-bounds array indexing, floating-point or integer overflows, loops always terminate, floating point rounding errors stay within specified limits etc. Something that Rust does not have. Rust has some potential and there are some companies that attempt to provide tooling to make it possible to write safe Rust code, but it's not there yet.

pierrec 8y ago

>you're guaranteed to be writing performant safe code Let's not get overboard here

mlevental 8y ago
edited to clarify with zero cost abstraction

Nokinside 8y ago

> and you're guaranteed to be writing performant safe code That's very far from truth.

mlevental 8y ago
There's a term that's thrown around on Reddit that I think is appropriate here (since you're the second person to make basically this same comment): shitposting. If you have a meaningful contribution to conversation (e.g. you can enlighten us to instances where rust compiles down to inefficient or unsafe code) then make it. Otherwise don't say anything.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  >If you have a meaningful contribution to conversation (e.g. you can enlighten us to instances where rust compiles down to inefficient or unsafe code) then make it. This should be applied to your original unsubstantiated claim. Rust has some features that improve safety. Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.
  - bluejekyll 8y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean by this: “Writing code in Rust does not generate safe code.” I mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. Perhaps you mean that Rust has unsafe, which allows you to write unsafe code in Rust. But technically that term is reserved for the developer to make a claim that though the compiler can’t determine the safety of this code, the developer is claiming it is safe. Then there is safe Rust, if you write safe Rust, the guarantees that the program output is safe are pretty high. Given that no software is devoid of bugs, it’s obviously not 100%. So do you have a specific argument your making about why Rust is not safe? Or is it a general comment about software? Edit: I suppose you could be pedantic in that rustc doesn’t generate code, but technically it does, mir and then llvmir. That code then gets compiled to platform specific binaries.
    - Nokinside 8y ago
      > mean philosophically you could say there is no safe code, but then what’s the point of any language improvement. I have been writing safety critical code for living, so I think that saying that code "is safe" because it is written in some language is categorical error (not just error of degree) unless it is a language enables formally proofing correctness. You can take fundamentally unsafe language like C. Restrict to subset of it MISRA C and use external static code analysis like Astree that that uses abstract interpretation to prove that there are no run time errors: no memory errors, no division of zero erros, no out-of-bounds array indexing, floating-point or integer overflows, loops always terminate, floating point rounding errors stay within specified limits etc. Something that Rust does not have. Rust has some potential and there are some companies that attempt to provide tooling to make it possible to write safe Rust code, but it's not there yet.