3 ms·

What is the wow with Rust? Seriously asking.

nobleach 5y ago
A few things come to mind. Rust has the potential to be fast... VERY fast. It also can be very safe. Pretty much everything in Rust utilizes the Result type (an Either Monad that causes Errors/Exceptions to become first-class citizens). It compiles to a single binary. Many of the packages in the ecosystem are very high-quality (Serde for example). Even still, this doesn't mean anyone should drop what they're doing and migrate all their code to Rust! If you're a Ruby dev (especially if you do Rails) and you're making a living churning out apps with your good old friends like Devise, RSpec, etc. Rust is probably not the thing that'll really wow you. It _can_ do web, and do it REALLY well. But the experience is very different. (Actix/Rocket)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  So Rust wants to be the new C? Like if someone was writing a new OS or code for an autonomous vehicle today is Rust a likely candidate?
  - mping 5y ago
    Rust wants to be the new C without C warts, using the compiler to ensure memory safety (up to a point), promoting immutability and having generics baked in. I'm not a C programmer, but I think Rust can fit almost everywhere C can fit.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  > Rust has the potential to be fast... VERY fast I think this should be phrased differently. There is a minor bloom of zero-allocation web frameworks in go and java, and probably a few others, which blow their peers out of the water and are horribly not at all idiomatic usages of the languages. They can be very fast, but the performance cliff for using idiomatic code is very significant. Does idiomatic rust perform VERY fast? Can it be both very safe AND very performant? I think the answer to both of those is yes, but I honestly haven't used it enough to know.
azangru 5y ago
Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Maybe the parent comment meant the practical implications, such as C-like speed with memory safety? As a language, Haskell has much more wow in it.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Does it have C like speed though? Have no idea. I guess I just don't care enough about performance for Rust to be a thing for me.
  - qsort 5y ago
    I don't really use Rust so YMMV, but what's genuinely special about it is that it's a new take on a system-level language with very modern features (Error monad, borrow checker, pattern matching, functional-like semantics) that were previously exclusive domain of garbage collected languages. Honestly I kind of cringe at the "do everything in rust" crowd, if you need to, say, write an API, you can just do that in Python or Ruby or Go, 99% of the times the performance penalty won't matter and Rust is just a very complicated tool for that job. But it single-handedly reopened the discussion on high performance, safe(r) languages, and I believe that's a very good thing even though I don't use Rust day-to-day. Projects like Zig are in a sense following in the footsteps of Rust.
unrealhoang 5y ago
The ability to use mutable data structure with worry-free mentality of immutable data structure (FP langs) is really new and special.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  So its a functional language with good performance? Or a systems functional language?
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Rather than designing around shared mutable state like a functional language, it gives you the tools to do it with greater confidence.
Mikeb85 5y ago
Systems programming language that's safer than C++, just as performant and has lots of functional goodies.

A few things come to mind. Rust has the potential to be fast... VERY fast. It also can be very safe. Pretty much everything in Rust utilizes the Result type (an Either Monad that causes Errors/Exceptions to become first-class citizens). It compiles to a single binary. Many of the packages in the ecosystem are very high-quality (Serde for example). Even still, this doesn't mean anyone should drop what they're doing and migrate all their code to Rust! If you're a Ruby dev (especially if you do Rails) and you're making a living churning out apps with your good old friends like Devise, RSpec, etc. Rust is probably not the thing that'll really wow you. It _can_ do web, and do it REALLY well. But the experience is very different. (Actix/Rocket)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joelbluminator 5y ago
So Rust wants to be the new C? Like if someone was writing a new OS or code for an autonomous vehicle today is Rust a likely candidate?
- mping 5y ago
  Rust wants to be the new C without C warts, using the compiler to ensure memory safety (up to a point), promoting immutability and having generics baked in. I'm not a C programmer, but I think Rust can fit almost everywhere C can fit.
zdragnar 5y ago
> Rust has the potential to be fast... VERY fast I think this should be phrased differently. There is a minor bloom of zero-allocation web frameworks in go and java, and probably a few others, which blow their peers out of the water and are horribly not at all idiomatic usages of the languages. They can be very fast, but the performance cliff for using idiomatic code is very significant. Does idiomatic rust perform VERY fast? Can it be both very safe AND very performant? I think the answer to both of those is yes, but I honestly haven't used it enough to know.

azangru 5y ago

Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Maybe the parent comment meant the practical implications, such as C-like speed with memory safety? As a language, Haskell has much more wow in it.

joelbluminator 5y ago
Does it have C like speed though? Have no idea. I guess I just don't care enough about performance for Rust to be a thing for me.
- qsort 5y ago
  I don't really use Rust so YMMV, but what's genuinely special about it is that it's a new take on a system-level language with very modern features (Error monad, borrow checker, pattern matching, functional-like semantics) that were previously exclusive domain of garbage collected languages. Honestly I kind of cringe at the "do everything in rust" crowd, if you need to, say, write an API, you can just do that in Python or Ruby or Go, 99% of the times the performance penalty won't matter and Rust is just a very complicated tool for that job. But it single-handedly reopened the discussion on high performance, safe(r) languages, and I believe that's a very good thing even though I don't use Rust day-to-day. Projects like Zig are in a sense following in the footsteps of Rust.

unrealhoang 5y ago

The ability to use mutable data structure with worry-free mentality of immutable data structure (FP langs) is really new and special.

joelbluminator 5y ago
So its a functional language with good performance? Or a systems functional language?
- closeparen 5y ago
  Rather than designing around shared mutable state like a functional language, it gives you the tools to do it with greater confidence.

Mikeb85 5y ago

Systems programming language that's safer than C++, just as performant and has lots of functional goodies.