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We'll s/biased/credible/ on this one. Can you think of any cases where he might be right? How often do you hit, for instance, "This code cleanly fit its origin

by pfraze 7y ago

We'll s/biased/credible/ on this one. Can you think of any cases where he might be right? How often do you hit, for instance, "This code cleanly fit its original construction, but now I have to add some complexity for new cases, and Rust is making that harder?" Put another way, once you're familiar with the borrow checker, how often do you find yourself or your teams fighting it?

steveklabnik 7y ago
It just depends. It's really hard to talk about this stuff because it's always so variable. I think that Rust tends to expose complexity in places that other languages paper over. This means that it can feel like Rust is adding complexity, but it's not really. It's surfacing the underlying complexity. This makes the end result more robust. It takes some practice, and there is the perennial question of "how long does it take to get to that point, and how much effort is it?" I think this line of questioning is more likely to be a real reason to not choose Rust, and is one of the reasons we've been trying to lower the learning curve. > Put another way, once you're familiar with the borrow checker, how often do you find yourself or your teams fighting it? Extremely rarely, if ever. It yells at you, you go "oh yeah, oops" and fix it, and move on with life. But, I should qualify that's mostly personal experience and what I hear from other folks generally and other teams at work; my team at work doesn't really write Rust, our main codebase is in Typescript and Go. I just saw this thread by the ex-CTO of Chef, it matches my experiences here: https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1239989909714173952 https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1239989909714173952
- pfraze 7y ago
  Okay thanks for the insights. Learning curve may reduce the available engineers (at least for a bit) but my concern is about whether the PL's premises are holding up in real world usage, which it sounds like (for you and other commenters) it has.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    Ah yeah. So I wrote this comment three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22411324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22411324 And as of earlier today, it's no longer just the way bytes are stored on Dropbox, but now every file sync too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782 It seems to be holding up! Still relatively early days.

by pfraze 7y ago

steveklabnik 7y ago

It just depends. It's really hard to talk about this stuff because it's always so variable. I think that Rust tends to expose complexity in places that other languages paper over. This means that it can feel like Rust is adding complexity, but it's not really. It's surfacing the underlying complexity. This makes the end result more robust. It takes some practice, and there is the perennial question of "how long does it take to get to that point, and how much effort is it?" I think this line of questioning is more likely to be a real reason to not choose Rust, and is one of the reasons we've been trying to lower the learning curve. > Put another way, once you're familiar with the borrow checker, how often do you find yourself or your teams fighting it? Extremely rarely, if ever. It yells at you, you go "oh yeah, oops" and fix it, and move on with life. But, I should qualify that's mostly personal experience and what I hear from other folks generally and other teams at work; my team at work doesn't really write Rust, our main codebase is in Typescript and Go. I just saw this thread by the ex-CTO of Chef, it matches my experiences here: https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1239989909714173952 https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1239989909714173952

pfraze 7y ago
Okay thanks for the insights. Learning curve may reduce the available engineers (at least for a bit) but my concern is about whether the PL's premises are holding up in real world usage, which it sounds like (for you and other commenters) it has.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  Ah yeah. So I wrote this comment three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22411324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22411324 And as of earlier today, it's no longer just the way bytes are stored on Dropbox, but now every file sync too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22595782 It seems to be holding up! Still relatively early days.