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> HOWEVER, Rust is such an excellent language that we all want to use it to write applications ANYWAY. Is this really the reason, or is it because people think
by dexwiz 5y ago
> HOWEVER, Rust is such an excellent language that we all want to use it to write applications ANYWAY.
Is this really the reason, or is it because people think they will get free performance wins by choosing the correct language? The plethora of articles detailing a developer's story trying to write X-style language in Rust shows that most are not approaching Rust with the correct mindset.
I have limited experience is Rust, but seems like most people are attracted by shiny new toys in the language. Many people have issues with OO languages, and the separation of data and function is attractive. But it lacks the run time most application developers have come to know, specifically GC and easy references.
- steveklabnik 5y agoI'm sure there's a bit of both. Many people talk about how they love the tooling, the type system, enums, traits... stuff unrelated to performance.
- ragnese 5y agoI can only speak for myself, obviously. But, I think it's obviously about more than performance. Otherwise, people have always had C, C++, LISP, and even Java and Go that will be generally faster than Python, PHP, and JavaScript. I'd say there are three things that most people rave about with Rust: * traits as type classes (even if they don't know the term "type class") * enums and pattern matching (not even as flexible as some other languages like MLs, but way more than is possible in most popular languages with only Swift coming close) * the Iterator trait. I might write a sonnet about how much I love Iterator in Rust. It's lazy iteration, but it's also optimized at compile time to basically just be turned into a for loop.