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Count me as third. I dislike how this stuff "infect" all your code calls: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ https://j

• bfrog 7y ago
  Infests sounds like it's a negative, there's always go if you'd prefer to have a GC and no generics. Those have other well known costs as time goes on
• hobofan 7y ago
  > I dislike how this stuff "infect" all your code calls Unlike in JS, it really doesn't. In Rust, at any point you have the option to run a Future returned from an async function to completion in a sync function (which blocks the thread) and stop the spread of async.
• jcranmer 7y ago
  > And the problem is rust is that we already have other stuff that infest everything: Borrows, mutability, ownership... I don't think anyone disagrees that the annotation of these concepts play a very heavy role in the type system and cognitive burden of writing code. But there are really three alternatives you can do here: 1. Do nothing, and rely on programmers to manually remember how to do all the necessary bookkeeping themselves. This is better known as "C", and the sheer amount of CVEs and other problems in code written in C is ample evidence that this approach just doesn't work. 2. Make the runtime do the automatic programming. JS is the exemplar of the pattern here. But this approach requires the VM to do garbage collection itself (which adds uncertain hidden overhead), generate code to handle arbitrary shapes (which can result in hidden performance cliffs). And heavily dynamic languages also turn compiler errors (such as fat-fingering a variable name) into runtime errors that can be accidentally ignored. 3. Shift the annotation into a mandatory part of the language, as Rust does. It makes the cognitive burden of writing the code higher, it requires more coding, but the resulting code tends to have the highest performance and lowest bugs of any of these approaches. The tradeoff you have to make is between "no safety", "compile-time safety", and "runtime safety"; the costs you have to weigh are the costs of testing to uncover bugs, the costs of programmer cognitive and annotation burden, and the (often hidden!) costs of the runtime to dynamically enforce the conditions. Rust has chosen to live in the camp of low implicit runtime cost and high compile-time safety, and it is really to pay the price for that with extra annotation burden. You may disagree with that choice, but it is a conscious choice that has been made.
  • mamcx 7y ago
    > 3. Shift the annotation into a mandatory part of the language, as Rust does. This is what I want. I just not like the specific implementation of awaits. I'm not much against it: i could live with it (I have used C#/F#/JS that is similar). The thing is that still split the world even if you don't want it. I think CSP/Actors have lesser cognitive load but of course I don't know how make them work without a runtime..
• pcwalton 7y ago
  I don't like the "what color is your function" post, because it presents Go's M:N solution as something new, when in fact it's just a user-mode implementation of threads just like NGPT was back in the early aughts. In fact, we have M:N in Rust too. It's not sufficient for people's performance needs, which is why async I/O exists. Either 1:1 threads or mioco might be sufficient for your performance needs; if so, you're free to use them and you won't have to worry about red or blue functions!
  • mamcx 7y ago
    I re-read and don't see where Go is claimed to be "something new".