4 ms·

> I think a lot of Rust users would argue they don’t even care much about performance. They just enjoy all of the correctness guarantees the compiler can enforc

by ptato 4y ago

> I think a lot of Rust users would argue they don’t even care much about performance. They just enjoy all of the correctness guarantees the compiler can enforce Aren't these correctness guarantees only for performance related factors though? (allocation/memory and concurrency). The rest of your program would be just as correct in any other language.

coder543 4y ago
No. A ton of languages don’t support proper Sum Types, and Rust’s emphasis on errors-as-values helps you think about error handling, instead of only thinking about the happy path. Rust also doesn’t do implicit type coercion and a host of other things that can cause correctness issues. Rust gives you the tools to express more of what you’re doing to the compiler than a lot of languages, which lets the compiler help you more. It’s natural that a lot of programs have some form of concurrency, so that’s an extremely common thing for Rust to help with, but it’s not the only thing.
ssokolow 4y ago
Not really. For me, the number-one Rust feature I love is that, by baking monadic optionality and error return in from the beginning (Option<T> and Result<T, E>), I can trust that, unless an author abuses panic! (in which case I never trust their code again), I can see all a function's return paths in its type signature. (Without having to choke down a pure functional language like Haskell with that currying-based function call syntax that I can never get used to.) The runners-up are how fast Rust starts compared to Python or Java or similar when writing a CLI tool and how nice PyO3 makes safely writing libraries or backends for tools that need to be in Python for some reason like "nothing but PyQt, PySide and possibly QtJambi offers memory-safe QWidget bindings... and I've never found a Java app that didn't feel laggy and sluggish on X11". See also https://cliffle.com/blog/rust-typestate/ https://cliffle.com/blog/rust-typestate/

by ptato 4y ago

coder543 4y ago

No. A ton of languages don’t support proper Sum Types, and Rust’s emphasis on errors-as-values helps you think about error handling, instead of only thinking about the happy path. Rust also doesn’t do implicit type coercion and a host of other things that can cause correctness issues. Rust gives you the tools to express more of what you’re doing to the compiler than a lot of languages, which lets the compiler help you more. It’s natural that a lot of programs have some form of concurrency, so that’s an extremely common thing for Rust to help with, but it’s not the only thing.

ssokolow 4y ago

Not really. For me, the number-one Rust feature I love is that, by baking monadic optionality and error return in from the beginning (Option<T> and Result<T, E>), I can trust that, unless an author abuses panic! (in which case I never trust their code again), I can see all a function's return paths in its type signature. (Without having to choke down a pure functional language like Haskell with that currying-based function call syntax that I can never get used to.) The runners-up are how fast Rust starts compared to Python or Java or similar when writing a CLI tool and how nice PyO3 makes safely writing libraries or backends for tools that need to be in Python for some reason like "nothing but PyQt, PySide and possibly QtJambi offers memory-safe QWidget bindings... and I've never found a Java app that didn't feel laggy and sluggish on X11". See also https://cliffle.com/blog/rust-typestate/ https://cliffle.com/blog/rust-typestate/