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> I won't take a GUI framework without a graphical designer, or a component ecosystem from companies selling GUI widgets in 21st century. Well, yeah, what I’m
by derefr 6y ago
> I won't take a GUI framework without a graphical designer, or a component ecosystem from companies selling GUI widgets in 21st century.
Well, yeah, what I’m saying with “these types of modern frameworks don’t impose very many constraints on the language” is that there’s no reason that Qt, UWP, Interface Builder, etc. can’t support Rust (or most other languages, really), because in the end the tooling is just generating/editing data in a declarative markup language, that the language’s toolkit binding parses. You don’t have to modify the tooling in order to get it working with a new language; you just need a new toolkit binding. Just like you don’t need to modify an HTML editor to get it to support a web browser written in a new language. Qt et al, like HTML, is renderer-implementation-language agnostic.
> Distributed computing, again when thinking about distributed calls a la Akka, Orleans, SQL distributed transactions, I rather have the productivity of a GC.
I think I agree re: the productivity multiplier of special-purpose distributed-computing frameworks. I don’t think I agree that it’s a GC that enables these frameworks to be productive. IMHO, it’s the framework itself that is productive, and the language being GCed is incidental.
But, either way—whether it’s easy or hard—you could still have one of these frameworks in Rust. Akka wasn’t exactly easy to impose on top of the JVM, but they did it anyway, and introduced a lot of non-JVM-y stuff in the process. (I’d expect that a distributed-computing framework for Rust would impose Objective-C-like auto-release-pools for GC.)
> Web development with Rust is nowhere close[...]
Web development with Rust isn’t near there yet, but unlike distributed computing, I don’t see anything about web development that fundamentally is made harder by borrow-checking / made easier by garbage-collection; rather the opposite. I fully expect Rust to eventually have a vibrant web-server-backend component ecosystem equivalent to Java’s.
> Rust best place is for kernels, drivers and absolute no GC deployment scenarios.
Those are good use-cases, but IMHO, the best place for Rust is embedding “hot kernels” of native code within managed runtimes. I.e. any library that’s native for speed, but embedded in an ecosystem package in a language like Ruby/Python/Erlang/etc., where it gets loaded through FFI and wrapped in an HLL-native interface. Such native libraries can and should be written in Rust instead: you want the speed of a native [compiled, WPO-able] language; but you also want/need safety, to protect your HLL runtime from your library’s code that you’re forcing to run inside it; and you also want an extremely “thin” (i.e. C-compatible) FFI, such that you’re not paying too much in FFI overhead for calls from your managed code into the native code. Rust gives you all three. (I see this being an increasingly popular choice lately. Most new native Elixir NIF libraries that I know of are written using https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler.)