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Since he mentions Rust, I have seen Rust being used for many different things and not only "systems programming", aking to a general purpose language. Is this

Since he mentions Rust, I have seen Rust being used for many different things and not only "systems programming", aking to a general purpose language. Is this because the language lends itself easily to all this tasks? or is the Rust hype and devs using it for different things to learn the language?

turbinerneiter 7y ago
The learning part is pretty string, I guess. I sometimes do scripting tasks in Rust now instead of Python and the motivation is clearly learning. At the same time, the tooling is so good and fun to use that I don't feel like I'm putting myself through a painful exercise. Stuff like clasp for example (library to do CLI interfaces) is so good that I prefer it over doing that in Python.
rurban 7y ago
Rust is currently the most overhyped language because it promises a lot of things, but cannot hold the most important ones. It's a nice language, but don't believe any security guarantee. memory safety, type safety, concurrency safety massively overhyped. Still much better than C++ though.
- otabdeveloper2 7y ago
  > Still much better than C++ though. Well, no. There is zero reason to use Rust if you already know modern C++. Rust's only benefit is being newbie-friendly.
  - rurban 7y ago
    I like cargo and easier threading. The syntax is annoying though. C/C++ really would benefit immensely from a central library repo.
  - rat87 7y ago
    Rust * is a lot simpler * has a package manager * has type classes (like interfaces with default implementations) * doesn't have multiple inheritance or inheritance * much nicer unified error/exception pattern * amazing compiler error messages * makes memory corruption and many forms of concurrency errors impossible(outside of ffi and unsafe) * has tuples+sum types w/destructing
setr 7y ago
Both, I think. The language is fairly high level, and the borrow checker + RAII covers a lot of the ergonomic-gains of garbage collection. It's also appealing in that it moves towards functional, but not too much (beneficial for those who like the idea of functional programming, but can't be assed to pick it up properly -- eg me). And the absurd hype cycle just keeps it permanently in mind.
- dmix 7y ago
  A lot of people get caught up in Rust's low level implementation stuff but you really don't need to touch that stuff at all if it's not your thing. Just understand enough about what you're doing with memory and the various performance trade offs which become more prominent at that level of the machine. There's more than enough high level stuff like the type system and traits which you can go harder into in terms of learning new/better ways to program.

turbinerneiter 7y ago

The learning part is pretty string, I guess. I sometimes do scripting tasks in Rust now instead of Python and the motivation is clearly learning. At the same time, the tooling is so good and fun to use that I don't feel like I'm putting myself through a painful exercise. Stuff like clasp for example (library to do CLI interfaces) is so good that I prefer it over doing that in Python.

rurban 7y ago

Rust is currently the most overhyped language because it promises a lot of things, but cannot hold the most important ones. It's a nice language, but don't believe any security guarantee. memory safety, type safety, concurrency safety massively overhyped. Still much better than C++ though.

otabdeveloper2 7y ago
> Still much better than C++ though. Well, no. There is zero reason to use Rust if you already know modern C++. Rust's only benefit is being newbie-friendly.
- rurban 7y ago
  I like cargo and easier threading. The syntax is annoying though. C/C++ really would benefit immensely from a central library repo.
- rat87 7y ago
  Rust * is a lot simpler * has a package manager * has type classes (like interfaces with default implementations) * doesn't have multiple inheritance or inheritance * much nicer unified error/exception pattern * amazing compiler error messages * makes memory corruption and many forms of concurrency errors impossible(outside of ffi and unsafe) * has tuples+sum types w/destructing

setr 7y ago

Both, I think. The language is fairly high level, and the borrow checker + RAII covers a lot of the ergonomic-gains of garbage collection. It's also appealing in that it moves towards functional, but not too much (beneficial for those who like the idea of functional programming, but can't be assed to pick it up properly -- eg me). And the absurd hype cycle just keeps it permanently in mind.

dmix 7y ago
A lot of people get caught up in Rust's low level implementation stuff but you really don't need to touch that stuff at all if it's not your thing. Just understand enough about what you're doing with memory and the various performance trade offs which become more prominent at that level of the machine. There's more than enough high level stuff like the type system and traits which you can go harder into in terms of learning new/better ways to program.