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I think the way that Rust releases keep hitting the front page of HN helps create an illusion that the language is changing faster than it really is. There's a

I think the way that Rust releases keep hitting the front page of HN helps create an illusion that the language is changing faster than it really is. There's a sense in which a front-page worthy release is expected to be a big one, and if that happens all the time, there must be a lot of big changes, right? That said, I'd have to say it's worth it in the case of stabilizing const genetics.

vardump 6y ago
I think there's been quite a bit of interest to adopt Rust in production lately. That might explain why Rust topics hit the front page so often.
- lumost 6y ago
  aye - it opens the door to native computing to a large number of devs who have only worked in modern GC'd languages. The cross-compilation targets of rust are highly appealing to those whose work may be 1. performance sensitive 2. want to run one stack across frontend/backend/native apps 3. don't want to learn multiple languages for multiple activities. It's a pretty compelling pitch.
  - azangru 6y ago
    Web frontend in Rust? Horror!
    - lumost 6y ago
      or is it? could take some nice performance gains/stability gains for SaaS apps with heavy visualization components. JS isn't known for being great at encapsulation either, there could be some benefits for exceptionally large front-ends.
    - dmit 6y ago
      How come? Wasm is only at ~92% browser adoption right now (per https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm), but certain classes of apps can easily take that 8% hit for all the benefits over the status quo languages that Rust brings. You get painless sharing of domain types between client and server via serde; you still get native async/await support; you get more powerful data modeling features than even Typescript can provide (although Typescript's union types are definitely much more ergonomic). You get a standard library that's not a joke. You don't have to wait until proposal-temporal gets ratified and implemented in order to have sane date/time handling (recently hit Stage 3 btw, woo!). Honestly, only ScalaJS can match all of those benefits, as far as I can tell after examining a dozen of languages targeting the web. So yeah, I'm super curious to hear what problems you encountered with Rust as a web frontend language.
      - lights0123 6y ago
        > although Typescript's union types are definitely much more ergonomic meh. Doing tricky stuff with them is far easier as TS is a dynamic language, but the fact that enum variants are each a variant makes constructing them really easy: let array = [1, 2, 3]; let some_array: Option<i32> = array.iter().map(Some).collect();
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Right, but that could just as easily be blog posts, rather than release announcements particularly, and reduce the appearance of constant change. I only mention it because people have wondered why so many think the language is changing a lot, when in practice it has slowed down quite a bit. Maybe part of the solution is not posting releases on HN.
GolDDranks 6y ago
I think that your comment is spot on, and I also think that this release is front-page worthy. It has the biggest stabilized feature since async/await which happened in 1.39.0.

vardump 6y ago

I think there's been quite a bit of interest to adopt Rust in production lately. That might explain why Rust topics hit the front page so often.

lumost 6y ago
aye - it opens the door to native computing to a large number of devs who have only worked in modern GC'd languages. The cross-compilation targets of rust are highly appealing to those whose work may be 1. performance sensitive 2. want to run one stack across frontend/backend/native apps 3. don't want to learn multiple languages for multiple activities. It's a pretty compelling pitch.
- azangru 6y ago
  Web frontend in Rust? Horror!
  - lumost 6y ago
    or is it? could take some nice performance gains/stability gains for SaaS apps with heavy visualization components. JS isn't known for being great at encapsulation either, there could be some benefits for exceptionally large front-ends.
  - dmit 6y ago
    How come? Wasm is only at ~92% browser adoption right now (per https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm), but certain classes of apps can easily take that 8% hit for all the benefits over the status quo languages that Rust brings. You get painless sharing of domain types between client and server via serde; you still get native async/await support; you get more powerful data modeling features than even Typescript can provide (although Typescript's union types are definitely much more ergonomic). You get a standard library that's not a joke. You don't have to wait until proposal-temporal gets ratified and implemented in order to have sane date/time handling (recently hit Stage 3 btw, woo!). Honestly, only ScalaJS can match all of those benefits, as far as I can tell after examining a dozen of languages targeting the web. So yeah, I'm super curious to hear what problems you encountered with Rust as a web frontend language.
    - lights0123 6y ago
      > although Typescript's union types are definitely much more ergonomic meh. Doing tricky stuff with them is far easier as TS is a dynamic language, but the fact that enum variants are each a variant makes constructing them really easy: let array = [1, 2, 3]; let some_array: Option<i32> = array.iter().map(Some).collect();
andrewflnr 6y ago
Right, but that could just as easily be blog posts, rather than release announcements particularly, and reduce the appearance of constant change. I only mention it because people have wondered why so many think the language is changing a lot, when in practice it has slowed down quite a bit. Maybe part of the solution is not posting releases on HN.

GolDDranks 6y ago

I think that your comment is spot on, and I also think that this release is front-page worthy. It has the biggest stabilized feature since async/await which happened in 1.39.0.