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> But the thing is that to a zig developer, it's clear that this is explicit static polymorphism getting compiled into a plethora of monomorphic callsites To a

> But the thing is that to a zig developer, it's clear that this is explicit static polymorphism getting compiled into a plethora of monomorphic callsites To a Rust programmer it is clear that the toolchain defaults are set up to satisfy the 99.99999999% of programmers whose goal isn't to "write the smallest hello world possible". You can change these defaults in your system config if you don't like them. Like you mention, one size doesn't fit all. To me that's one of the main differences between Zig and Rust.

lhorie 6y ago
It's also not entirely about clarity of facts per se, but rather which facts. It's clear for a javascript developer that doing NPM install is going to bring in half the universe worth of transitive deps and that they can opt out by writing things by hand. Most js developers' goals are indeed not to write the smallest hello world, and here we are in a world where people complain of news websites pulling MBs of scripts. As I mentioned, one could conceivably address this by merely picking jquery over react in many cases, for example. There's a predictable sliding scale of performance between using electron, nodegui and qt proper via c++. Etc. All of this is to say: Defaults and base choices matter. I think in terms of servicing end users, rust and c++ are somewhat unique in that they are relatively complex languages targeting ambitious performance goals, at the cost of more language complexity. That has its own appeal for sure, but I echo esbuild author's sentiment about a language having to be fun for side projects, and for me personally, I like the simple "very sharp knife" variety of technologies
user-the-name 6y ago
It's not clear to me. I'm not a Rust programmer, but I've written several projects where I'm pulling in a large Rust dependency, because the best available library for something is implemented in Rust, and it offers a C interface. These libraries I've used have been very good, but also, extremely large. Like, over 100 MB .a files. They slow down compilation noticeably just by linking, and while a lot of the size is stripped out during linking, the resulting sizes tend to still be uncomfortably big. So to me it seems Rust binaries tend to be huge both on the small end large ends of the spectrum, and they are large to the point where it becomes a real problem.
- volta83 6y ago
  You should open an issue with whoever packages that library. Nobody expects library consumers to be experts in how to build libraries. But this isn't any different that depending on a C library, and discovering that the Makefile they are using compiles it with -O0, and makes it super slow. To a non-C programmer, flipping -O0 to -O3 is wizardry. --- Point being, you are not a rust programmer, and the defaults that are good for "development" are not good for "shipping" and therefore no good for you. If your library doesn't do this right, open a bug. The library can override this, and a package that builds it should override this.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    No, this is a fully optimised release build, built according to official instructions. Rust code is just very big. This seems to come with the territory.
    - volta83 6y ago
      > Rust code is just very big. This seems to come with the territory. As someone that uses Rust every day to program STM32s with 128KB of space... i... disagree... Rust is the only high level language I know that allows me to customize the language run-time at will, allowing me to provide my own unwinding, threading, memory allocation, ... runtimes, to be able to program tiny machines as if I was just programming any normal one. With other languages either I can use the standard library implementation, or I can't use the standard library and some language features at all. With Rust, I can't use the standard library implementation for desktops, but I can just swap its backend by an embedded one, and am still able to re-use all the high level code, libraries from crates.io that use it, etc.

lhorie 6y ago

It's also not entirely about clarity of facts per se, but rather which facts. It's clear for a javascript developer that doing NPM install is going to bring in half the universe worth of transitive deps and that they can opt out by writing things by hand. Most js developers' goals are indeed not to write the smallest hello world, and here we are in a world where people complain of news websites pulling MBs of scripts. As I mentioned, one could conceivably address this by merely picking jquery over react in many cases, for example. There's a predictable sliding scale of performance between using electron, nodegui and qt proper via c++. Etc. All of this is to say: Defaults and base choices matter. I think in terms of servicing end users, rust and c++ are somewhat unique in that they are relatively complex languages targeting ambitious performance goals, at the cost of more language complexity. That has its own appeal for sure, but I echo esbuild author's sentiment about a language having to be fun for side projects, and for me personally, I like the simple "very sharp knife" variety of technologies

user-the-name 6y ago

It's not clear to me. I'm not a Rust programmer, but I've written several projects where I'm pulling in a large Rust dependency, because the best available library for something is implemented in Rust, and it offers a C interface. These libraries I've used have been very good, but also, extremely large. Like, over 100 MB .a files. They slow down compilation noticeably just by linking, and while a lot of the size is stripped out during linking, the resulting sizes tend to still be uncomfortably big. So to me it seems Rust binaries tend to be huge both on the small end large ends of the spectrum, and they are large to the point where it becomes a real problem.

volta83 6y ago
You should open an issue with whoever packages that library. Nobody expects library consumers to be experts in how to build libraries. But this isn't any different that depending on a C library, and discovering that the Makefile they are using compiles it with -O0, and makes it super slow. To a non-C programmer, flipping -O0 to -O3 is wizardry. --- Point being, you are not a rust programmer, and the defaults that are good for "development" are not good for "shipping" and therefore no good for you. If your library doesn't do this right, open a bug. The library can override this, and a package that builds it should override this.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  No, this is a fully optimised release build, built according to official instructions. Rust code is just very big. This seems to come with the territory.
  - volta83 6y ago
    > Rust code is just very big. This seems to come with the territory. As someone that uses Rust every day to program STM32s with 128KB of space... i... disagree... Rust is the only high level language I know that allows me to customize the language run-time at will, allowing me to provide my own unwinding, threading, memory allocation, ... runtimes, to be able to program tiny machines as if I was just programming any normal one. With other languages either I can use the standard library implementation, or I can't use the standard library and some language features at all. With Rust, I can't use the standard library implementation for desktops, but I can just swap its backend by an embedded one, and am still able to re-use all the high level code, libraries from crates.io that use it, etc.