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As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an h

• faitswulff 6y ago
  This podcast might be relevant: the creator of Flask who is now using Rust: https://realpython.com/podcasts/rpp/18/ https://realpython.com/podcasts/rpp/18/ Edit - actually I was probably thinking of this podcast with the same interviewee: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/004-rust-in-production-armin-ronacher/ https://rustacean-station.org/episode/004-rust-in-production...
  • nitred 6y ago
    Just started listenting to it. It's exactly what I was looking for, thank you. Armin Ronacher's opinion on such things would hold a lot weight in my head.
• artursapek 6y ago
  > I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour This has been my, and a lot of my colleagues', experience with Rust. Never have I seen people fall in love with a programming language so strongly. And the love lasts for a long time.
  • christiansakai 6y ago
    Try to use that in real world and see if your love still stays put. An hour is not enough to validate Rust.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • artursapek 6y ago
      Typical condescending HN response. We are using Rust, we've used it to build and ship a successful native desktop app.
      • christiansakai 6y ago
        In which sentence is this condesdending?
        • catach 6y ago
          The assumption that real-world use had not been tried.
          • christiansakai 6y ago
            An hour isn’t enough to use it on real world use, am I not right?
            • steveklabnik 6y ago
              One way to read your comment, which I think the way others are reading it, is “you only like rust because you haven’t used it much, try it more and you won’t like it anymore.” The implication being that only people who haven’t used Rust can like it. That may not be what you meant but it seems like that’s what people are understanding.
              • christiansakai 6y ago
                An honor to have Steve Klabnik himself responded to me. Thank you for your amazing work for the Rust community and the books as well. I'm a Rust hobbyist, I'm just trying to be objective, especially since majority of my day job doesn't involve Rust, and for sure my team mates refuse for me to introduce small bits of Rust code here and there, because of unknown territory.
  • CRConrad 6y ago
    Do you know any Object Pascal programmers?
• ithrow 6y ago
  am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. All those lifetime annotations are not sheer beauty or pretty, sure they are necessary but not nice to look at if you are comparing it to a higher level language.
  • the_duke 6y ago
    You can write Rust code with almost no lifetine annotations. That's heavily dependent on the domain, of course. But for relatively simple function signatures they are usually inferred correctly, and you can often just clone instead of requiring references.
    • nobleach 6y ago
      Yes, you can clone all day long and just reuse variable names as if you were writing JavaScript, but what does that do to your memory allocation?
      • gpm 6y ago
        Most languages just clone all day long, it's not that bad, rust clones (like most languages) are just to the first reference counted pointer after all.
        • the_duke 6y ago
          Well, yes and no. Eg cloning a string leads to an extra allocation and a memcopy. If you want to get a similar performance profile to GC languages, you have to stick your types behind a `Rc<T>>/Arc<T>` or `Rc<RefCell<T>> / Arc<Mutex<T>>` if you need mutability. But modern allocators hold up pretty well to a GC, which amortizes the allocations. The extra memcopying can be less detrimental than one might think.
          • throwaway894345 6y ago
            “Yes and no” is too generous; most languages clone only very infrequently (basically only for primitives where there is no distinction between a deep and shallow copy). For complex types (objects and maps and lists) they pass references (sometimes “fat” references, but nevertheless, not a clone).
• bitL 6y ago
  Look into C++17, that one makes C++ look like Python but with worse basic libraries (not that Python ones are great either).
  • rapsey 6y ago
    Unfortunately one can’t live solely in C++17. The sheer amount of syntax and knowledge required to write C++ productively is insane.
• eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python Sarcasm?
  • disown 6y ago
    "As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages" In other words, someone who doesn't have a CS background, never took theory of programming languages, etc. "Python programmer" is like the 2020's equivalent of a "HTML developer" from the 2000s.
  • nitred 6y ago
    "... or as well as any compiled language can." Some syntax is close to Python so some mental load is minimized, i.e use of snake_case, self, None and type annotation syntax, dict unpacking. Some lines read like sentences i.e. for loops, single line if statements, impl Foo for Bar etc. Some design choices also read better I think, for example, let reads better than var. Of course such preferences are personal. I've read other comments that mention that the tutorial covers only basic Rust features and it can get much more complicated when using more advanced features. Edit: Added sentence about advanced features.
• christiansakai 6y ago
  Rust makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Also reading Python code is easier (less syntax noise) on the eyes. The article above is very beginner Rust, and I won't rely on that to look at actual Rust code in the wild. If you want to take a look at what actual Rust code in the wild, take for example, a web server Actix, and try to figure out what the documentation says.
  • felipellrocha 6y ago
    > Rust makes hard things easy and easy things hard. I don't agree with this, and, if anything, this reads very biased. Insofar, Rust has made my life a lot easier, and I have not run into any major issues aside the borrow checker. And this was early on. Two years now playing with the language and I barely run into it anymore.
    • christiansakai 6y ago
      Async has ecosystem fracture issues. Creating graph data structures require you to understand more about borrow checker. Majority of people will probably want to use Rust for web? Which makes async needs to be ergonomic enough if it wants consider wide adoption.
      • dralley 6y ago
        So does Python. Asyncio is mediocre at best and difficult to express certain patterns in. Other libraries are far better, but not in the standard library.
      • felipellrocha 6y ago
        Agreed it could be a little more ergonomic, but it wasn't a blocker. I was able to figure it all out in a weekend, and write plenty of services with it.
  • simias 6y ago
    I find that advanced Python is quite hard to read. Well, I find that advanced dynamically typed languages tend to be hard to read in general, because you can never be sure what type your inputs and outputs are and what values they can take. Usually my At least idiomatic Python shuns wildcard imports that obfuscate where symbols are coming from (that drove me insane in Ruby). On the other hand Rust code tends to be very strict about what your types are (even more so than a language like C++ where metaprogramming is duck-typed by default). It can lead to complicated code, but baring some weird operator overloading decision you should know exactly what calls what from whom when you look at any method or function. Rust code can be tricky to write at times, but I generally find it a pleasure to read. Sure, ultra-complicated generic code can be overwhelming, but this complexity would be here in one form or the other regardless of the language, Rust just forces you to be explicit about it.
• thisisusername 6y ago
  As another Python programmer I also agree. Rust's features are very mature especially compared to an old dinosaur like C. I only wish its syntax was more like Swift's which is more pleasing to the eyes and was also made by the same guy.
  • dagmx 6y ago
    Minor note,. Graydon created rust and worked on Swift. He didn't create Swift however. That said...both languages read like close siblings to me to the point I find it annoying switching between the two because I keep trying to use each ones language semantics in the other subconsciously.
    • thisisusername 6y ago
      I feel like I'm being bullied and nitpicked but you're speaking politely so I'm confused.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • thisisusername 6y ago
      Stop narcissistically using peer pressure to turn people against me. It's really gross and creepy and I will not tolerate it. Why am I flagged for standing up for myself like a good person should?
• bccdee 6y ago
  I was mostly a Python user, and now I primarily write Rust when I can. It's an absolutely gorgeous language, especially for being so practical. There's a bit of a progression with Rust, where at first you see the examples and you go "this language is so beautiful!" Then you try to write something nontrivial in Rust and you go "wow the compiler will NOT stop yelling at me, how does anyone write anything in this language?" Rust has a fairly austere learning curve in general, and it takes some getting used to. That passes, though, and then you really do get to experience the elegance and power which sold you on Rust in the first place. There's a period where writing Rust feels substantially slower that writing in anything else, but that passes too. It really is as good as it sounds, but it might take a while before you're accustomed enough to Rust's paradigm that it feels that way.
• jgraham 6y ago
  I've shipped relatively lots of code in Python and a little bit in Rust. For any project where performance or correctness are significant concerns I'd much rather use Rust than Python. It provides a lot more tools to help you write correct code, and express invariants in a machine-checkable way. This means that they are maintained when the code changes, even when multiple contributors are involved. I'm must more confident in my ability to ship correct code in Rust and maintain that correctness over time. Rust also doesn't have the performance ceiling (floor?) of Python, either for single threaded programs, or — especially — for those that benefit from concurrency or parallelism. Of course for some progames there's a clear hot loop that you could implement as a native extension in Python, but other workloads have relatively flat profiles where the performance bottlenecks are making allocations or similar. As well as the actual language features, the commitment to backward compatibility from the Rust authors means that you don't get regular breakage simply from updating to a newer version of the language. I think Python 2 being 2.7 for such a long time gave people a false impression of how stable a foundation Python provides and the fact that point releases of 3.x often cause problems feels like it causes a lot of unnecessary makework for Pyton users and is rather offputting. That doesn't mean I'd always choose Rust of course. You do require more upfront design to get something that works at all. Some projects also benefit greatly from not requiring a compile step and making use of the ubiquity of a Python interpreter. And I think I'd find it difficult to justify using Rust for a typical web backend that's mostly composing together various well-tested libraries to provide an API on top of a database.
  • unethical_ban 6y ago
    My only bone to pick with this commentary is that it is 2020 and people are still complaining about Python as being unstable because of 2 -> 3. It was a rough transition, to be sure. Python2 was released 20 years ago, and Python3 12 years ago. It is a pretty stable language.
    • gpm 6y ago
      My housemate was just rolling back from python 3.8 to 3.7 yesterday due to a backwards incompatible change breaking a library... it's not just 2 -> 3 that makes python relatively unstable compared to rust.
• mikeschmatz 6y ago
  Rust is a complete pain for the types of problems Python is used for. Same for Go/Java.
  • dmit 6y ago
    I used to use Ruby for small (100-500 loc) scripts to parse various CSV/JSON documents. You craft a couple perfect stanzas of immaculate code to do what you need and you feel great. Then you run it and turns out you forgot an `end` somewhere. Fuck. You run it again, and the name of the hash map variable is unknown, because you changed it at the last moment to make it more descriptive. Fuck. There, fixed everything. Run it again. Running for a couple seconds now with no errors -- pop the champagne! Wait, what's that? Row #998 of 1000 had an unexpected type of value? Fuck. Fix it, ship it. Wheel, snipe, and celly. At some point I just started writing these things in Rust instead. Describe what I want deserialized as a struct. List the fields I want as enum variants. What's that, rustc, the "name" field is optional? Ok, that makes sense, I'll handle this right away. Done. Hey, rustc, how come people talk about fighting you all the time when you're actually the world's greatest pair programmer?
• zem 6y ago
  D is also worth a look as a compiled C- family language that can read like python. https://bitbashing.io/2015/01/26/d-is-like-native-python.html https://bitbashing.io/2015/01/26/d-is-like-native-python.htm...
• nvarsj 6y ago
  I know it’s pedantic but I despise the semicolons in Rust. They make the language ugly and constantly burden the programmer unnecessarily. It’s a bizarre choice for such a modern language.
  • everybodyknows 6y ago
    I find my own JS code easier to read since I dropped them, and my tired eyeballs no longer need to lex the ";" pattern. Yet some JS masters (Mike Bostock) include them religiously. Semi-colons do make make possible multiple statements on a single line -- but surely there's a stronger rationale than that.
    • ptx 6y ago
      Python allows semicolons for separating multiple statements on a single line, even though it doesn't require them otherwise. (Those statements can't have blocks, because of the indentation-based syntax, but that's a separate issue.)