5 ms·

Rust isn't hard. Programming is hard. Rust just points out failure states before you encounter them in production.

threatofrain 4y ago
All type systems will have meaningful and true propositions which are apparent to the programmer but not yet to the language team. Choosing a typed language is choosing to have a relationship with a living & evolving team/ecosystem, one which can improve over time in their ability to express and prove propositions or provide ergonomic abstractions. Some of what the author is complaining about matches my conversations with people who aspire to be Rust library authors — that you're often trying to hijack the type system because you <do> actually know better.
Gigachad 4y ago
Other languages make this massively simpler by just disabling possible sources of failure like multithreading.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I enjoy Rust, but it's not that simple. It really is more work to accomplish certain tasks in Rust than many other languages even when what you're doing is safe. The narrative that "Rust isn't hard" is getting tiresome, and I say this as someone who writes a lot of Rust. Let's be honest that Rust can be harder than many other programming languages in many ways, but those of us who use it believe the upsides and tradeoffs are worth the minor to moderate increase in difficulty. Pretending Rust is easy just sets beginners up for disappointment when they get into Rust and realize it wasn't what they were sold. Or worse, they start doubting themselves when they encounter the hard parts because Rust fans were busy insisting it's all easy.
- Diggsey 4y ago
  Writing widely useful, performant, reusable, correct and stable libraries is very hard. Rust is the easiest language to do that in. If someone says programming in another language is easier, it's because they are not attempting (or are failing) to do one or more of those things. Those things are not always important so that's fine, but a lot of programmers (myself included) have this dream of being able to solve a problem once rather than over and over again, and that's why Rust appeals to us, and why we argue against Rust being hard - because it's actually easier for our particular usecase, but clearly not everyone has that same usecase.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    > Writing widely useful, performant, reusable, correct and stable libraries is very hard. Correct. > Rust is the easiest language to do that in. Wrong. Rust provides very substantially less support to library designers than C++ does. Anyone creating ambitious libraries finds Rust a big step down. Rust might get more of what C++ offers library designers as it matures, but only at the cost of whatever simplicity it can still claim.
    - Diggsey 4y ago
      > Rust provides very substantially less support to library designers than C++ does. Anyone creating ambitious libraries finds Rust a big step down. Before I used Rust my main language was C++ where I specialized in writing libraries, and this is a ridiculous statement. It's only recently that the C++ standard library has gained enough functionality to do even some basic things in a portable way, so you're relying on other libraries to provide that, yet there is no standardized way to declare dependencies on those other libraries. There is no module system to ease structuring library code. There is no hygiene - a ton of stuff you include will just pollute the global namespace. There is no standard way to version your code. There is no standard way to update a library. Everyone uses incompatible string types - seriously, if you think Rust has too many string types, wait until you find out that every freaking C++ library represents strings differently, sometimes using the same types though! There is no standard place to publish libraries. Even basic language types like `int` differ massively from platform to platform, or even between different compilers on the same platform. Each compiler's preprocessor behaves slightly differently. The programmer must manually forward declare their functions, types, etc, and the rules are different for inline/templated code. All code is unsafe, and yet the rules for what constitutes UB are informal at best. (Whereas in Rust, the rules for UB are also not fully defined yet, but this is only relevant for the minority of your code which is not safe). All experienced C++ programmers think in terms of lifetimes, and yet cannot express this through the type system, so this must be documented informally. There is no standardized coding style or format. I'm going to stop now just because I'm bored but this list could go on for a very long time...
      - 4y ago
- supramouse 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat, I spend a bit of my working day writing in Rust .. it's a great language but it's very cumbersome and I find it suffers form poor ergonomics, like it's annoying to type
  - crabbygrabby 4y ago
    I find it enjoyable to type for the most part. Explicit type casts aren't a treasure or anything, but then I think about why I am doing it and I can't really complain. I feel you, but, my experience differs in the end I guess. To be fair turbofishes we're something I discovered by intuition, so maybe I'm a lost soul.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Rust isn't hard for the things you try to solve in Rust. The author compares Rust code with Go code. Those two languages serve entirely different purposes, with entirely different mechanisms behind it. Go does what the author does with ease because the runtime fixes all the complicated parts for you. You tell Go what you want and it'll try to solve all the memory management/threading/memory safety issues for you, usually succeeding. Rust doesn't do that. Rust expects you not just to tell it what you want, but also how you want it to happen. I think comparisons between Rust and Go/C#/Java are what will really trip up a beginner. Rust has a lot of nice features found in higher level languages, but it's decidedly not a higher level language. Rust operates in the space of C and C++, where a small mistake can cause memory corruption no debugger will ever be able to unravel, but where a well placed byte of padding can accelerate a program by as much as 30 percent. I think the difficulty in Rust lies in that it will enforce correctness. Competing languages are less strict about that, especially when it comes to threading. You tell them a piece of memory is safe to use across thread boundaries and they'll believe you, and most of the time you can rely on race conditions not screwing you over perfectly well. A C program can be short, fast, and clear, as long as you leave out the error checking and resource management in case of failures; with Rust you often don't get that luxury. Writing correct code is a slow, tedious, painful experience, and in Rust you'll have to live with that pain (unless you throw around unsafe{} everywhere). I believe that teaching programming should follow a bottom-up approach, but many others disagree. If you've dabbled in assembly, done some multi threaded C(++) and experienced the challenges in low-level code, Rust should be enjoyable enough to learn after cursing at the borrow checker a bunch of times. If you're a top-down learner, though, you'll run face-first into low-level problems and their complexities for seemingly no good reason.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    > I think the difficulty in Rust lies in that it will enforce correctness. Competing languages are less strict about that, especially when it comes to threading. Enforcing correctness at compile time is not the only way to insure correctness. Some do enjoy solving language puzzles (so choose Rust) and some prefer thinking before coding and prefer solving design puzzles. I personally prefer that latter, as the 'hard' problems are intellectually interesting, solving them is satisfying, and over the years the design lessons build upon each other. At which point you don't need a Mommy Dearest Compiler to ensure correctness.
- adastra22 4y ago
  > Pretending Rust is easy just sets beginners up for disappointment when they get into Rust and realize it wasn't what they were sold. Or worse, they start doubting themselves when they encounter the hard parts because Rust fans were busy insisting it's all easy. You could be describing me. I recently convinced my boss to let me write a server in Rust for the safety, speed, etc. After being two weeks overdue, I threw it all out and wrote a working version in modern C++17 in an afternoon. Of course part of the issue was language familiarity, but I think also what I was trying to do was objectively harder in Rust in many respects, and the ecosystem of crates was less mature than battle-tested set of libraries I was using in C++. At the end of the day I want to ship code and move on to the next project. Rust wasn't helping me there.
  - blub 4y ago
    Which libraries did you use in C++?
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Boring things like boost, abseil, and the standard library.
nhumrich 4y ago
Im not so sure. There are a lot of error states that won't happen in production ever with other languages because the language/libaries handle those conditions gracefully without you needing to care. Rust pushes this to the edge, _which is good if you want that contol_, but is a cost you have to pay.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>Rust isn't hard. Programming is hard. Programming should be hard only if the problem you are trying to solve is hard. Creating an boring CRUD app shouldn't be hard. Predicting with a good degree of success the market trends for stocks and options should be hard.
imaginaryNumb3r 4y ago
This right here. Rust is a low-level language hat makes a whole dimension of implicit knowledge explicit. This is a very good thing, but if you are a programmer that is used to "copy paste, and then it works". You will have a very, very, very bad time with it. Rust forces you to think about memory. In an age where dynamic typing is so prevalent this seems like a fading art.
WuxiFingerHold 4y ago
Why do you think the vast majority of software is written in GC languages? How does Rust point out deadlocks?

All type systems will have meaningful and true propositions which are apparent to the programmer but not yet to the language team. Choosing a typed language is choosing to have a relationship with a living & evolving team/ecosystem, one which can improve over time in their ability to express and prove propositions or provide ergonomic abstractions. Some of what the author is complaining about matches my conversations with people who aspire to be Rust library authors — that you're often trying to hijack the type system because you <do> actually know better.

Gigachad 4y ago

Other languages make this massively simpler by just disabling possible sources of failure like multithreading.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

I enjoy Rust, but it's not that simple. It really is more work to accomplish certain tasks in Rust than many other languages even when what you're doing is safe. The narrative that "Rust isn't hard" is getting tiresome, and I say this as someone who writes a lot of Rust. Let's be honest that Rust can be harder than many other programming languages in many ways, but those of us who use it believe the upsides and tradeoffs are worth the minor to moderate increase in difficulty. Pretending Rust is easy just sets beginners up for disappointment when they get into Rust and realize it wasn't what they were sold. Or worse, they start doubting themselves when they encounter the hard parts because Rust fans were busy insisting it's all easy.

Diggsey 4y ago
Writing widely useful, performant, reusable, correct and stable libraries is very hard. Rust is the easiest language to do that in. If someone says programming in another language is easier, it's because they are not attempting (or are failing) to do one or more of those things. Those things are not always important so that's fine, but a lot of programmers (myself included) have this dream of being able to solve a problem once rather than over and over again, and that's why Rust appeals to us, and why we argue against Rust being hard - because it's actually easier for our particular usecase, but clearly not everyone has that same usecase.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  > Writing widely useful, performant, reusable, correct and stable libraries is very hard. Correct. > Rust is the easiest language to do that in. Wrong. Rust provides very substantially less support to library designers than C++ does. Anyone creating ambitious libraries finds Rust a big step down. Rust might get more of what C++ offers library designers as it matures, but only at the cost of whatever simplicity it can still claim.
  - Diggsey 4y ago
    > Rust provides very substantially less support to library designers than C++ does. Anyone creating ambitious libraries finds Rust a big step down. Before I used Rust my main language was C++ where I specialized in writing libraries, and this is a ridiculous statement. It's only recently that the C++ standard library has gained enough functionality to do even some basic things in a portable way, so you're relying on other libraries to provide that, yet there is no standardized way to declare dependencies on those other libraries. There is no module system to ease structuring library code. There is no hygiene - a ton of stuff you include will just pollute the global namespace. There is no standard way to version your code. There is no standard way to update a library. Everyone uses incompatible string types - seriously, if you think Rust has too many string types, wait until you find out that every freaking C++ library represents strings differently, sometimes using the same types though! There is no standard place to publish libraries. Even basic language types like `int` differ massively from platform to platform, or even between different compilers on the same platform. Each compiler's preprocessor behaves slightly differently. The programmer must manually forward declare their functions, types, etc, and the rules are different for inline/templated code. All code is unsafe, and yet the rules for what constitutes UB are informal at best. (Whereas in Rust, the rules for UB are also not fully defined yet, but this is only relevant for the minority of your code which is not safe). All experienced C++ programmers think in terms of lifetimes, and yet cannot express this through the type system, so this must be documented informally. There is no standardized coding style or format. I'm going to stop now just because I'm bored but this list could go on for a very long time...
    - 4y ago
supramouse 4y ago
I'm in the same boat, I spend a bit of my working day writing in Rust .. it's a great language but it's very cumbersome and I find it suffers form poor ergonomics, like it's annoying to type
- crabbygrabby 4y ago
  I find it enjoyable to type for the most part. Explicit type casts aren't a treasure or anything, but then I think about why I am doing it and I can't really complain. I feel you, but, my experience differs in the end I guess. To be fair turbofishes we're something I discovered by intuition, so maybe I'm a lost soul.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Rust isn't hard for the things you try to solve in Rust. The author compares Rust code with Go code. Those two languages serve entirely different purposes, with entirely different mechanisms behind it. Go does what the author does with ease because the runtime fixes all the complicated parts for you. You tell Go what you want and it'll try to solve all the memory management/threading/memory safety issues for you, usually succeeding. Rust doesn't do that. Rust expects you not just to tell it what you want, but also how you want it to happen. I think comparisons between Rust and Go/C#/Java are what will really trip up a beginner. Rust has a lot of nice features found in higher level languages, but it's decidedly not a higher level language. Rust operates in the space of C and C++, where a small mistake can cause memory corruption no debugger will ever be able to unravel, but where a well placed byte of padding can accelerate a program by as much as 30 percent. I think the difficulty in Rust lies in that it will enforce correctness. Competing languages are less strict about that, especially when it comes to threading. You tell them a piece of memory is safe to use across thread boundaries and they'll believe you, and most of the time you can rely on race conditions not screwing you over perfectly well. A C program can be short, fast, and clear, as long as you leave out the error checking and resource management in case of failures; with Rust you often don't get that luxury. Writing correct code is a slow, tedious, painful experience, and in Rust you'll have to live with that pain (unless you throw around unsafe{} everywhere). I believe that teaching programming should follow a bottom-up approach, but many others disagree. If you've dabbled in assembly, done some multi threaded C(++) and experienced the challenges in low-level code, Rust should be enjoyable enough to learn after cursing at the borrow checker a bunch of times. If you're a top-down learner, though, you'll run face-first into low-level problems and their complexities for seemingly no good reason.
- eternalban 4y ago
  > I think the difficulty in Rust lies in that it will enforce correctness. Competing languages are less strict about that, especially when it comes to threading. Enforcing correctness at compile time is not the only way to insure correctness. Some do enjoy solving language puzzles (so choose Rust) and some prefer thinking before coding and prefer solving design puzzles. I personally prefer that latter, as the 'hard' problems are intellectually interesting, solving them is satisfying, and over the years the design lessons build upon each other. At which point you don't need a Mommy Dearest Compiler to ensure correctness.
adastra22 4y ago
> Pretending Rust is easy just sets beginners up for disappointment when they get into Rust and realize it wasn't what they were sold. Or worse, they start doubting themselves when they encounter the hard parts because Rust fans were busy insisting it's all easy. You could be describing me. I recently convinced my boss to let me write a server in Rust for the safety, speed, etc. After being two weeks overdue, I threw it all out and wrote a working version in modern C++17 in an afternoon. Of course part of the issue was language familiarity, but I think also what I was trying to do was objectively harder in Rust in many respects, and the ecosystem of crates was less mature than battle-tested set of libraries I was using in C++. At the end of the day I want to ship code and move on to the next project. Rust wasn't helping me there.
- blub 4y ago
  Which libraries did you use in C++?
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Boring things like boost, abseil, and the standard library.

nhumrich 4y ago

Im not so sure. There are a lot of error states that won't happen in production ever with other languages because the language/libaries handle those conditions gracefully without you needing to care. Rust pushes this to the edge, _which is good if you want that contol_, but is a cost you have to pay.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>Rust isn't hard. Programming is hard. Programming should be hard only if the problem you are trying to solve is hard. Creating an boring CRUD app shouldn't be hard. Predicting with a good degree of success the market trends for stocks and options should be hard.

imaginaryNumb3r 4y ago

This right here. Rust is a low-level language hat makes a whole dimension of implicit knowledge explicit. This is a very good thing, but if you are a programmer that is used to "copy paste, and then it works". You will have a very, very, very bad time with it. Rust forces you to think about memory. In an age where dynamic typing is so prevalent this seems like a fading art.

WuxiFingerHold 4y ago

Why do you think the vast majority of software is written in GC languages? How does Rust point out deadlocks?