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“Since we began our journey with Rust, the number of projects using Rust inside Meta has increased at an accelerated rate” That almost sounds like an endorseme

“Since we began our journey with Rust, the number of projects using Rust inside Meta has increased at an accelerated rate” That almost sounds like an endorsement. I’ve been holding off learning Rust. However, it seems like Rust adoption is reaching a tipping point.

runevault 4y ago
Rust adoption very much seems to be ramping up within the really big companies. Google talking about it both for Android and Chrome, FB with a ton of things, Apple had uses for it I think but I'm blanking on what, Amazon is using it for at least some new AWS infrastucture...
- darzu 4y ago
  Microsoft has been using it internally as well.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    I look forward to seeing Rust# (or R# for maximum confusion).
  - runevault 4y ago
    Yeah. They are both writing code in Rust and also dabbling in creating a language of their own to see how that goes, not necessarily with the intent of releasing it, but at least exploring the space from first principles instead of being incumbered by Rust's decisions. I think the name started with V but I cannot find it right now with quick Googling.
    - rascul 4y ago
      I believe you're thinking of Project Verona. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-verona/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...
      - runevault 4y ago
        This is it, thank you for digging it up!
      - darzu 4y ago
        I wouldn't put much stock in MSR languages until they get usage in other orgs. There's at least a dozen research languages in flight at a given point in time. They used to have this great site were you could interact with them all: https://web.archive.org/web/20180130101736/https://www.rise4fun.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180130101736/https://www.rise4... Source: I'm a former member of RiSE
        runevault 4y ago
        Verona is less interesting in the language that I expect to make it into the world sense and more they may learn things while exploring safety that can be applied by someone else. Rust does a lot of good with exploring the safety space, but I hope we don't simply let that be the end of any exploration of building safety into the language at a deep level.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        To be fair, many modern C# features have started their life in MSR languages and eventually found their way to C#. It is also where F# started, although they seem not yet to know where to push it, or if it was a good idea to actually box it in VS 2010.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Note that on Android it is only endorsed for system code by Google itself and OEMs, officially there are no plans to support it on the NDK, or Android Studio.
  - runevault 4y ago
    Yeah sorry I should have been more specific that I meant used in the operating system. That was my bad.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Nothing prevents Google to eventually change their mind in regards to its support on userspace, however given how the NDK has been managed all these years (as a kind of side project at least from the outside), I pretty much doubt it.
      - runevault 4y ago
        Right the future could be anything, so we might as well just talk about the present.
- pornel 4y ago
  It's commonly used at Cloudflare too. You're probably browsing pages piped via Rust services every day.
gary17the 4y ago
> I’ve been holding off learning Rust. Rust is quite an easy language to learn and a pleasurable language to use, due to its modern ergonomics and internal consistency. Give it a try. The only trick is that Rust newcomers actually need to read up on Rust borrow checker and lifetime annotations first, as opposed to learning Rust only through hacking with it. Those two concepts are unique to Rust and need to be well understood beforehand to avoid frustration.
- duped 4y ago
  I don't think Rust is easy to learn, it's has a kind of famously steep learning curve. The tooling is great which helps, but it's not easy for new-ish systems programmers.
  - brink 4y ago
    Yeah, I have to agree with this. I tried to get my team at my previous work to adopt Rust, and they all pretty much failed to really pick it up. Granted they weren't the most talented group I've worked with.
  - DoesntMatter22 4y ago
    Every video I've watched on youtube of Rust vs Go makes me think Rust is not a whole lot of fun to write.
    - gary17the 4y ago
      The borrow checker and lifetime annotations. It's always the borrow checker and lifetime annotations - otherwise Rust is, IMHO, as readable as (the excellent) Golang.
      - dvlsg 4y ago
        I've often wondered what it would be like having a variant of Rust that was essentially the same underlying language, but with a garbage collector of some kind instead of a borrow checker and lifetime annotations.
ActorNightly 4y ago
Yep, and its pretty much going to become the next C++ - i.e widely adopted at first, and driven into a shit state. Specifically because of this https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html This needs to exist in Rust for it to get adopted, because forcing good developers to get explicit with code for memory safety when they are doing simple operations is going to result in them ignoring the language. So eventually code bases are going to be exactly like C++ code bases - C++ has a standard library and smart pointers that eliminate a lot of errors with dangling pointers, and if people use those exclusively (or better yet, the language disallowed any C style pointers or arrays), the language would be dramatically more safe. If you want to improve development, focus on smarter compilers/interpreters, not languages.
- gary17the 4y ago
  Being "explicit with code for memory safety [even for] simple operations" is the whole point of Rust. Otherwise, sooner or later, as a codebase grows, you make mistakes that your compiler cannot catch (e.g., you give an immutable reference to a component and later on unexpectedly mutate that same referenced memory from under that component). > [Rust] [will be] driven into a shit state. Specifically because of [unsafe Rust] Using unsafe Rust is actually frowned upon in the Rust community, unless you specifically need it in order to interface with another programming language (e.g., Foreign Function Interface), work around some OS issue (e.g., memory pinning for Linux driver development) and so on. Otherwise, you are supposed to always write safe Rust code. Way more than unsafe Rust, what worries me is the potential future, long-term language feature bloat. I wholeheartedly do hope that Rust core team will keep the language as simple and consistent as humanly possible. > If you want to improve development, focus on smarter compilers/interpreters, not languages. Well, in order to get a smarter compiler, you need new language features to be able to feed additional information about programmer's intent into that compiler - hence Rust's new language features, for example (memory reference) lifetime annotations that all newcomers have a problem with :).
  - ActorNightly 4y ago
    Rust community can't control what happens in enterprise, and enterprise has a nasty habit of prioritizing delivery times over robustness. >Well, in order to get a smarter compiler, you need new language features to be able to feed additional information about programmer's intent into that compiler Yes and no. There are some things you want to specify for compiler to check, but a lot of behavior can be inferred from the code. Think about some backend server functionality for a website that has to do processing on some json data. You could take that code in python and write absolutely safe C code, and the process to translate it wouldn't be that hard.

runevault 4y ago

Rust adoption very much seems to be ramping up within the really big companies. Google talking about it both for Android and Chrome, FB with a ton of things, Apple had uses for it I think but I'm blanking on what, Amazon is using it for at least some new AWS infrastucture...

darzu 4y ago
Microsoft has been using it internally as well.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  I look forward to seeing Rust# (or R# for maximum confusion).
- runevault 4y ago
  Yeah. They are both writing code in Rust and also dabbling in creating a language of their own to see how that goes, not necessarily with the intent of releasing it, but at least exploring the space from first principles instead of being incumbered by Rust's decisions. I think the name started with V but I cannot find it right now with quick Googling.
  - rascul 4y ago
    I believe you're thinking of Project Verona. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-verona/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...
    - runevault 4y ago
      This is it, thank you for digging it up!
    - darzu 4y ago
      I wouldn't put much stock in MSR languages until they get usage in other orgs. There's at least a dozen research languages in flight at a given point in time. They used to have this great site were you could interact with them all: https://web.archive.org/web/20180130101736/https://www.rise4fun.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180130101736/https://www.rise4... Source: I'm a former member of RiSE
      - runevault 4y ago
        Verona is less interesting in the language that I expect to make it into the world sense and more they may learn things while exploring safety that can be applied by someone else. Rust does a lot of good with exploring the safety space, but I hope we don't simply let that be the end of any exploration of building safety into the language at a deep level.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        To be fair, many modern C# features have started their life in MSR languages and eventually found their way to C#. It is also where F# started, although they seem not yet to know where to push it, or if it was a good idea to actually box it in VS 2010.
pjmlp 4y ago
Note that on Android it is only endorsed for system code by Google itself and OEMs, officially there are no plans to support it on the NDK, or Android Studio.
- runevault 4y ago
  Yeah sorry I should have been more specific that I meant used in the operating system. That was my bad.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Nothing prevents Google to eventually change their mind in regards to its support on userspace, however given how the NDK has been managed all these years (as a kind of side project at least from the outside), I pretty much doubt it.
    - runevault 4y ago
      Right the future could be anything, so we might as well just talk about the present.
pornel 4y ago
It's commonly used at Cloudflare too. You're probably browsing pages piped via Rust services every day.

gary17the 4y ago

> I’ve been holding off learning Rust. Rust is quite an easy language to learn and a pleasurable language to use, due to its modern ergonomics and internal consistency. Give it a try. The only trick is that Rust newcomers actually need to read up on Rust borrow checker and lifetime annotations first, as opposed to learning Rust only through hacking with it. Those two concepts are unique to Rust and need to be well understood beforehand to avoid frustration.

duped 4y ago
I don't think Rust is easy to learn, it's has a kind of famously steep learning curve. The tooling is great which helps, but it's not easy for new-ish systems programmers.
- brink 4y ago
  Yeah, I have to agree with this. I tried to get my team at my previous work to adopt Rust, and they all pretty much failed to really pick it up. Granted they weren't the most talented group I've worked with.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  Every video I've watched on youtube of Rust vs Go makes me think Rust is not a whole lot of fun to write.
  - gary17the 4y ago
    The borrow checker and lifetime annotations. It's always the borrow checker and lifetime annotations - otherwise Rust is, IMHO, as readable as (the excellent) Golang.
    - dvlsg 4y ago
      I've often wondered what it would be like having a variant of Rust that was essentially the same underlying language, but with a garbage collector of some kind instead of a borrow checker and lifetime annotations.

ActorNightly 4y ago

Yep, and its pretty much going to become the next C++ - i.e widely adopted at first, and driven into a shit state. Specifically because of this https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html This needs to exist in Rust for it to get adopted, because forcing good developers to get explicit with code for memory safety when they are doing simple operations is going to result in them ignoring the language. So eventually code bases are going to be exactly like C++ code bases - C++ has a standard library and smart pointers that eliminate a lot of errors with dangling pointers, and if people use those exclusively (or better yet, the language disallowed any C style pointers or arrays), the language would be dramatically more safe. If you want to improve development, focus on smarter compilers/interpreters, not languages.

gary17the 4y ago
Being "explicit with code for memory safety [even for] simple operations" is the whole point of Rust. Otherwise, sooner or later, as a codebase grows, you make mistakes that your compiler cannot catch (e.g., you give an immutable reference to a component and later on unexpectedly mutate that same referenced memory from under that component). > [Rust] [will be] driven into a shit state. Specifically because of [unsafe Rust] Using unsafe Rust is actually frowned upon in the Rust community, unless you specifically need it in order to interface with another programming language (e.g., Foreign Function Interface), work around some OS issue (e.g., memory pinning for Linux driver development) and so on. Otherwise, you are supposed to always write safe Rust code. Way more than unsafe Rust, what worries me is the potential future, long-term language feature bloat. I wholeheartedly do hope that Rust core team will keep the language as simple and consistent as humanly possible. > If you want to improve development, focus on smarter compilers/interpreters, not languages. Well, in order to get a smarter compiler, you need new language features to be able to feed additional information about programmer's intent into that compiler - hence Rust's new language features, for example (memory reference) lifetime annotations that all newcomers have a problem with :).
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  Rust community can't control what happens in enterprise, and enterprise has a nasty habit of prioritizing delivery times over robustness. >Well, in order to get a smarter compiler, you need new language features to be able to feed additional information about programmer's intent into that compiler Yes and no. There are some things you want to specify for compiler to check, but a lot of behavior can be inferred from the code. Think about some backend server functionality for a website that has to do processing on some json data. You could take that code in python and write absolutely safe C code, and the process to translate it wouldn't be that hard.