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Much as I love Rust, some of its advocates have a tendency to drop into conversations like this and oversimplify the situation, suggesting it be immediately use

by _bxg1 7y ago

Much as I love Rust, some of its advocates have a tendency to drop into conversations like this and oversimplify the situation, suggesting it be immediately used for everything under the sun, with limited context. There are many factors that go into deciding whether to integrate a new language into your project. For example: - Tooling - Build process - Library support - Developer expertise - Interop Any of these can cause lots of friction, especially when your codebase has more than one language. Not to mention hiring challenges, man-hours required to do a conversion, etc. That's not to say it's automatically the wrong decision, but it's certainly not a simple one. The case may be stronger on a greenfield project - though some of the above still applies - but then in many cases you may care more about iteration speed than performance, landing you with a GCed language. Edit: I've been informed that the parent comment was trolling

adwn 7y ago
You're inadvertently replying to a troll account impersonating steveklabnik [1] (note the position of the 'l' and 'n'). Please don't judge the Rust community based on such idiots – most of us are quite reasonable and don't go around proselytizing others :-) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=steveklabnik https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=steveklabnik
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Ah- well then I would say the fact that I couldn't distinguish the post from other, real comments I've seen on HN just reinforces my point ;) But yeah, I personally know those are a minority of the Rust community; I'm in the same boat where I don't want the whole thing being judged by a vocal minority.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    An interesting thing about aggressive Rust evangelists here on HN or on /r/programming is that many of them are actually trolls accounts. Try looking at their comment history next time you encounter one.
bluejekyll 7y ago
So that was a troll impersonating a well known Rustacean, but your comment is interesting in that it tries to discount a valid suggestion perhaps Rust is a good option in this situation. (Though pjmlp makes a good point about using the OS toolkit). But to your criticisms, Rust has had a lot of attention to making it a decent drop in tool for integrating with C. There are multiple tools to produce the correct ABI either from C or to C from Rust. This is to your point about tooling and interop. Putting rust into an existing project, is generally as easy as linking against any foreign C library, I’ve personally done this enough to know it’s easy to do either as a static library or a dynamic library. To your point about build process. As to developer learning and choice of another language, there may be reasons why C was used in the first place that disqualify GC’ed languages. So if you want and need a safe C replacement that is easy to insert, Rust is a good option. People shouldn’t disqualify it out of hand. In this particular place perhaps it’s not the right solution, and maybe a poor time to suggest it, but your reasons are not accurate to the realities of that work.

by _bxg1 7y ago

adwn 7y ago

You're inadvertently replying to a troll account impersonating steveklabnik [1] (note the position of the 'l' and 'n'). Please don't judge the Rust community based on such idiots – most of us are quite reasonable and don't go around proselytizing others :-) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=steveklabnik https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=steveklabnik

_bxg1 7y ago
Ah- well then I would say the fact that I couldn't distinguish the post from other, real comments I've seen on HN just reinforces my point ;) But yeah, I personally know those are a minority of the Rust community; I'm in the same boat where I don't want the whole thing being judged by a vocal minority.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  An interesting thing about aggressive Rust evangelists here on HN or on /r/programming is that many of them are actually trolls accounts. Try looking at their comment history next time you encounter one.

bluejekyll 7y ago

So that was a troll impersonating a well known Rustacean, but your comment is interesting in that it tries to discount a valid suggestion perhaps Rust is a good option in this situation. (Though pjmlp makes a good point about using the OS toolkit). But to your criticisms, Rust has had a lot of attention to making it a decent drop in tool for integrating with C. There are multiple tools to produce the correct ABI either from C or to C from Rust. This is to your point about tooling and interop. Putting rust into an existing project, is generally as easy as linking against any foreign C library, I’ve personally done this enough to know it’s easy to do either as a static library or a dynamic library. To your point about build process. As to developer learning and choice of another language, there may be reasons why C was used in the first place that disqualify GC’ed languages. So if you want and need a safe C replacement that is easy to insert, Rust is a good option. People shouldn’t disqualify it out of hand. In this particular place perhaps it’s not the right solution, and maybe a poor time to suggest it, but your reasons are not accurate to the realities of that work.