4 ms·

I’ll share a use case where Rust specifically has been a godsend. I write software for users who have strong engineering backgrounds but tend to know just enou

I’ll share a use case where Rust specifically has been a godsend. I write software for users who have strong engineering backgrounds but tend to know just enough about computers to be dangerous. They tend to know a smattering if Python, Perl, SQL, SAS, R, or Matlab, and will happily use a well-documented CLI tool, but cannot be relied upon to do basic sysadmin tasks effectively. They run a mix of windows and OSX, and some set up Linux VMs. They are hired for their expertise in their domain, not because they are great IMS technicians. They deal with large, heterogenous, difficult-to-schematize datasets and value speed, but it is a total waste of their time to troubleshoot environment/linking issues that frequently accompany building and using C/C++ utilities for many non-programmer users. I’ve found Rust to be hugely beneficial for writing programs to serve this user base (RF engineers in my case, but I’d imagine people who write software for ag/life science people, banking analysts, civil/environmental engineers and others have similar challenges). * it’s also nice that it’s hard to segfault in Rust. Many existing tools in my domain are notoriously fragile in this regard.

bigger_cheese 8y ago
Wow that sums up my world precisely - also engineering. Especially the part about people knowing a smattering of Perl, Python, SAS and Matlab. Add in C++ (written in circa early 90's style i.e C with "new" and "delete") and Fortran (Fortan 77 style straight out of the classical Numerical Recipes text book) you could be describing my org. People here have so many issues managing things like library dependencies. This is especially a problem on Windows. I remember witnessing the guy next to me waste hours trying to build and link an image analysis library written in C++. I could feel his frustration from across the partition "This library needs this dependency, which has to build from scratch but before I can do that I have to build library 'zzz' but to do that I have to download something called "CMAKE". I've finally done all that but then I forgot to set a compiler flag correctly in some library 3 steps up the chain and now I have to start all over again. At the end of all that you better be damn sure you were paying attention and didn't accidentally mix some 32 / 64 bit code together which apparently is pretty easy to do when you are downloading random code from various websites." I think these were instructions he was trying to follow (https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/introduction/windows_install/windows_install.html https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/introduction/windo...) Stuff like configuring environment variables, editing make files etc are very difficult for a lot of otherwise smart people to understand. These people have no problem writing code to do quite complex analysis just building it and distributing it is quite challenging.

bigger_cheese 8y ago

Wow that sums up my world precisely - also engineering. Especially the part about people knowing a smattering of Perl, Python, SAS and Matlab. Add in C++ (written in circa early 90's style i.e C with "new" and "delete") and Fortran (Fortan 77 style straight out of the classical Numerical Recipes text book) you could be describing my org. People here have so many issues managing things like library dependencies. This is especially a problem on Windows. I remember witnessing the guy next to me waste hours trying to build and link an image analysis library written in C++. I could feel his frustration from across the partition "This library needs this dependency, which has to build from scratch but before I can do that I have to build library 'zzz' but to do that I have to download something called "CMAKE". I've finally done all that but then I forgot to set a compiler flag correctly in some library 3 steps up the chain and now I have to start all over again. At the end of all that you better be damn sure you were paying attention and didn't accidentally mix some 32 / 64 bit code together which apparently is pretty easy to do when you are downloading random code from various websites." I think these were instructions he was trying to follow (https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/introduction/windows_install/windows_install.html https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/introduction/windo...) Stuff like configuring environment variables, editing make files etc are very difficult for a lot of otherwise smart people to understand. These people have no problem writing code to do quite complex analysis just building it and distributing it is quite challenging.