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I think Rust makes a lot of very hard things possible, at the expense of making some easy things more annoying. That's a tradeoff that bothers a lot of people
by currymj 8y ago
I think Rust makes a lot of very hard things possible, at the expense of making some easy things more annoying.
That's a tradeoff that bothers a lot of people who hear the Rust hype, only to find that it's more annoying to write the things they want to write. But if you use Rust and it makes a very hard thing possible, this is an incredibly empowering experience and you'll become a passionate believer. This is a dynamic that leads to arguments on the internet.
I've never done any substantial low-level systems programming, but there are high-level situations where I think Rust was better than anything else.
In one case, I simply couldn't get decent performance for something out of any garbage collected language I tried -- and GC time was the actual bottleneck. Rewriting in C++ seemed very intimidating and likely to be error-prone. Doing the same thing in Rust gave me the same benefits with the confidence that I hadn't made any dumb memory errors.
The second benefit of Rust is that concurrency and parallelism is easy, in the sense that 1) for basic parallelism, you can use Rayon without even thinking about it, and 2) in more complex cases, you can share stuff across threads and be confident that you haven't introduced any weird, hard-to-debug race conditions.