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Optimizing for the first 6 hours of development is insane and also the reason we have so many towering piles of unmaintainable garbage in our industry. Rust is

by smt88 5y ago

Optimizing for the first 6 hours of development is insane and also the reason we have so many towering piles of unmaintainable garbage in our industry. Rust is the wrong language for a hackathon, but hackathons are an extreme edge case. Most devs work on large, aging code bases built by other people. Rust and similar languages make that work much less error-prone. Who cares if it's not good for a hackathon?

cedws 5y ago
What should the expectations be then? I don't think 6 hours is an unreasonable timeframe to produce a Matrix bot in any language (we're not counting esolangs of course). It's a POST request, I mean come on. Maybe a GET long poll as well. How long should it take in Rust?
- option_greek 5y ago
  It takes a couple of lines to call any API in Rust using reqwest: https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest I'm not sure where this 6 hours for matrix bot thingy comes from. A better comparison would be to write something from scratch or use comparable frameworks.
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    It's not just where. It's when. I suspect it's true but like a few years ago (I haven't really monitored Rust due to real life work).
blub 5y ago
I don’t think it’s just 6 hours. Rust requires more up-front design both during initial development and when doing maintenance compared to Python. One has to specify things in much more detail when writing Rust and sometimes that’s great, but other times it doesn’t really matter much. Many times one doesn’t really care about the overhead of GC or that values a copied a lot. I’ve always written default-efficient code myself (mostly in C++) and using Python exclusively and over a longer time period for data wrangling was an educational experience. It feels quite liberating to just write code without having to think at every point about efficiency and memory.

by smt88 5y ago

cedws 5y ago

What should the expectations be then? I don't think 6 hours is an unreasonable timeframe to produce a Matrix bot in any language (we're not counting esolangs of course). It's a POST request, I mean come on. Maybe a GET long poll as well. How long should it take in Rust?

option_greek 5y ago
It takes a couple of lines to call any API in Rust using reqwest: https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest https://github.com/seanmonstar/reqwest I'm not sure where this 6 hours for matrix bot thingy comes from. A better comparison would be to write something from scratch or use comparable frameworks.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  It's not just where. It's when. I suspect it's true but like a few years ago (I haven't really monitored Rust due to real life work).

blub 5y ago

I don’t think it’s just 6 hours. Rust requires more up-front design both during initial development and when doing maintenance compared to Python. One has to specify things in much more detail when writing Rust and sometimes that’s great, but other times it doesn’t really matter much. Many times one doesn’t really care about the overhead of GC or that values a copied a lot. I’ve always written default-efficient code myself (mostly in C++) and using Python exclusively and over a longer time period for data wrangling was an educational experience. It feels quite liberating to just write code without having to think at every point about efficiency and memory.