7 ms·

Rusts tooling is pretty stellar.

NanoCoaster 7y ago
Depends. Package Management, compiler errors? Absolutely. IDE support? Not so much. I don't think it's fair to compare it to C# / JVM languages, but even compared to other languages, I wouldn't say the tooling is all that great. Macros make IDE support a lot harder than in other languages, the atrocious compile times sure do as well. While IntelliJ Rust and rust-analyzer both try to do their best (kudos to the teams working on them!), it's still nowhere near anything I'd call "stellar". There are mitigations being worked on right now, like compiling macros to WASM[0] and Cranelift[0], but these endeavours, while very promising, I wouldn't call production-ready yet. [0] https://github.com/dtolnay/watt https://github.com/dtolnay/watt [1] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift EDIT: Also, debugging. I'm not sure of the current state of it, but last time I checked, it was pretty much just GDB integration that was working. CLion (which I think uses GDB?) is able to give you a nice UI for basic debugging, don't know about VSCode integration. Still, even if it works, it's not at all comparable to debugging in C#/JVM, you're limited to very basic stuff compared to these languages / the well-known IDEs for them. So, again, it may be "fine" or even "good", but imho it's not exactly stellar :)
- Groxx 7y ago
  Re compile times: in nearly all cases I've seen, un-optimized builds (opt-level=0 or 1) are still quite fast. Do you know of any counter-examples? I'd love to see what the cause is. Optimized builds though, yeah, you routinely hear about multi-hour builds. As long as there's a dev-friendly fast mode though, slow optimized builds don't bother me all that much.
  - NanoCoaster 7y ago
    In my experience, the problem is that debug builds (which, I assume, are not optimized) are still annoying. I recently built a new PC and got a Ryzen 3900x, so I'll probably have to check again with that :) Now, "atrocious" may have been bad wording without context: I think it's just taking very long to finish the normal edit-start-debug cycle, compared to other languages (Go, Java, C# for example). I don't have any numbers right now, but I'll try to update my post once I get home, I've done a few basic emulator projects in Rust :) At least, it was long enough to be annoying to me. Maybe I'm just too used to C#, which I use at work.
    - LandR 7y ago
      I've seen some pretty long compile times in C#, at my previous job building a local copy of the whole solution was around 40mins to an hour (400+ csproj).
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        I guarantee that a 400+ module Go program or 400+ Rust crates will build much slower (if no other reason, simply because Go or Rust compilers do a lot of work that is deferred to runtime in C#).
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    What counts as "quite fast" for you? If you're talking about multi-hour builds, then you might not be talking on the same scale as others. I would consider 10 seconds to be pretty slow for a small/medium sized project.
    - Groxx 7y ago
      Yea, fair. But for compiled languages, a few seconds is still fast for the field - Go takes that long on anything but tiny projects. My job's main Go binary takes about 30 seconds for a rebuild, for instance, and I know of other projects here that take well over a minute. Many of the hours-long optimized builds for Rust projects that I've seen have turned to <10 seconds without optimizations on a clean build (possibly libraries are still cached tho), and even fairly large ones are still less than a minute. Tiny projects are around a second or less. I'm usually looking at pathological cases though, so I'm not sure how well those hold up in general. So I'm not looking for interactively fast - very few languages achieve that on even medium-sized codebases, even if they're interpreted. But under a minute for a couple million lines of code in the project and libraries fits in my "reasonable" range.
- richardwhiuk 7y ago
  VSCode with gdb at the backend gives you IDE like debugging. VSCode with RLS gives you decent IDE support - not Visual Studio for C# standard, but much better than a large number of languages.
  - Macha 7y ago
    At the caveat that RLS is a bit fragile - I have a project with a moderately large proc macro that generates multiple items and RLS falls over on that project now. Rust Analyzer is more robust but doesn't have a debugger or as comprehensive a feature set yet.
dragonsh 7y ago
Rust copied tooling from Go and Python. Also its tooling cannot work without internet and need to download MB's of data for simple development, and on the other hand proclaims itself to be systems programming language to replace C and C++ which doesn't require active internet to work. Also C++17 is much better version taking away the deficiencies of earlier versions and if not better at least provide similar run-time guarantee and safety as Rust (which also needs to rely on unsafe code to do anything meaningful with systems programming). So if you use either modern incarnation of C++ or Rust, you will get same safety guarantees. Just with C++ you will not have to climb the mountain of learning just to do simple things. I think Rust gets a lot of hype because it's syntax is complex and learning curve is much higher than C or C++ and programmers see new shiny language which got some traction as Panacea for all the programming problems.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Did you forget how much apt-get build-essentials is going to take in terms of space?
  - shiftless 7y ago
    Did you miss the "cannot work without internet" part? That is only one of several dealbreakers for me, for all of these Web 2.0 shitware tools. Only a fool connects his dev machine to the internet, knowing what we do now about the state of computer insecurity. The other dealbreaker in this case being that Rust is developed by Mozilla, an evil organization that is joined to the hip with another evil organization (Google.)
- ben-schaaf 7y ago
  > So if you use either modern incarnation of C++ or Rust, you will get same safety guarantees. As a C++ Dev who's done some rust on the side this is utter horseshit. Regardless of which C++ version you use it is utterly trivial to write code with undefined behaviour. Even if you're extremely diligent you will eventually be hunting down a bug caused by undefined behaviour.
  - 7y ago

Depends. Package Management, compiler errors? Absolutely. IDE support? Not so much. I don't think it's fair to compare it to C# / JVM languages, but even compared to other languages, I wouldn't say the tooling is all that great. Macros make IDE support a lot harder than in other languages, the atrocious compile times sure do as well. While IntelliJ Rust and rust-analyzer both try to do their best (kudos to the teams working on them!), it's still nowhere near anything I'd call "stellar". There are mitigations being worked on right now, like compiling macros to WASM[0] and Cranelift[0], but these endeavours, while very promising, I wouldn't call production-ready yet. [0] https://github.com/dtolnay/watt https://github.com/dtolnay/watt [1] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift EDIT: Also, debugging. I'm not sure of the current state of it, but last time I checked, it was pretty much just GDB integration that was working. CLion (which I think uses GDB?) is able to give you a nice UI for basic debugging, don't know about VSCode integration. Still, even if it works, it's not at all comparable to debugging in C#/JVM, you're limited to very basic stuff compared to these languages / the well-known IDEs for them. So, again, it may be "fine" or even "good", but imho it's not exactly stellar :)

Groxx 7y ago
Re compile times: in nearly all cases I've seen, un-optimized builds (opt-level=0 or 1) are still quite fast. Do you know of any counter-examples? I'd love to see what the cause is. Optimized builds though, yeah, you routinely hear about multi-hour builds. As long as there's a dev-friendly fast mode though, slow optimized builds don't bother me all that much.
- NanoCoaster 7y ago
  In my experience, the problem is that debug builds (which, I assume, are not optimized) are still annoying. I recently built a new PC and got a Ryzen 3900x, so I'll probably have to check again with that :) Now, "atrocious" may have been bad wording without context: I think it's just taking very long to finish the normal edit-start-debug cycle, compared to other languages (Go, Java, C# for example). I don't have any numbers right now, but I'll try to update my post once I get home, I've done a few basic emulator projects in Rust :) At least, it was long enough to be annoying to me. Maybe I'm just too used to C#, which I use at work.
  - LandR 7y ago
    I've seen some pretty long compile times in C#, at my previous job building a local copy of the whole solution was around 40mins to an hour (400+ csproj).
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      I guarantee that a 400+ module Go program or 400+ Rust crates will build much slower (if no other reason, simply because Go or Rust compilers do a lot of work that is deferred to runtime in C#).
- nicoburns 7y ago
  What counts as "quite fast" for you? If you're talking about multi-hour builds, then you might not be talking on the same scale as others. I would consider 10 seconds to be pretty slow for a small/medium sized project.
  - Groxx 7y ago
    Yea, fair. But for compiled languages, a few seconds is still fast for the field - Go takes that long on anything but tiny projects. My job's main Go binary takes about 30 seconds for a rebuild, for instance, and I know of other projects here that take well over a minute. Many of the hours-long optimized builds for Rust projects that I've seen have turned to <10 seconds without optimizations on a clean build (possibly libraries are still cached tho), and even fairly large ones are still less than a minute. Tiny projects are around a second or less. I'm usually looking at pathological cases though, so I'm not sure how well those hold up in general. So I'm not looking for interactively fast - very few languages achieve that on even medium-sized codebases, even if they're interpreted. But under a minute for a couple million lines of code in the project and libraries fits in my "reasonable" range.
richardwhiuk 7y ago
VSCode with gdb at the backend gives you IDE like debugging. VSCode with RLS gives you decent IDE support - not Visual Studio for C# standard, but much better than a large number of languages.
- Macha 7y ago
  At the caveat that RLS is a bit fragile - I have a project with a moderately large proc macro that generates multiple items and RLS falls over on that project now. Rust Analyzer is more robust but doesn't have a debugger or as comprehensive a feature set yet.

dragonsh 7y ago

Rust copied tooling from Go and Python. Also its tooling cannot work without internet and need to download MB's of data for simple development, and on the other hand proclaims itself to be systems programming language to replace C and C++ which doesn't require active internet to work. Also C++17 is much better version taking away the deficiencies of earlier versions and if not better at least provide similar run-time guarantee and safety as Rust (which also needs to rely on unsafe code to do anything meaningful with systems programming). So if you use either modern incarnation of C++ or Rust, you will get same safety guarantees. Just with C++ you will not have to climb the mountain of learning just to do simple things. I think Rust gets a lot of hype because it's syntax is complex and learning curve is much higher than C or C++ and programmers see new shiny language which got some traction as Panacea for all the programming problems.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
Did you forget how much apt-get build-essentials is going to take in terms of space?
- shiftless 7y ago
  Did you miss the "cannot work without internet" part? That is only one of several dealbreakers for me, for all of these Web 2.0 shitware tools. Only a fool connects his dev machine to the internet, knowing what we do now about the state of computer insecurity. The other dealbreaker in this case being that Rust is developed by Mozilla, an evil organization that is joined to the hip with another evil organization (Google.)
ben-schaaf 7y ago
> So if you use either modern incarnation of C++ or Rust, you will get same safety guarantees. As a C++ Dev who's done some rust on the side this is utter horseshit. Regardless of which C++ version you use it is utterly trivial to write code with undefined behaviour. Even if you're extremely diligent you will eventually be hunting down a bug caused by undefined behaviour.
- 7y ago