3 ms·

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 p

by 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.
    - gary17the 4y ago
      You can approximate this already: forget Rust references (borrow checking + lifetimes; in other words, raw pointers) and start hacking with Rust using its shared ownership (reference-counted) smart pointers, immutable Rc<T>[1], mutable RefCell<T>[2] and the combination of the two[3]. The syntax will, overall, get considerably more dense than Go, but otherwise analogous to Go. Instead of GC cycles, memory will be freed incrementally, immediately when no longer in use. [1] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html [2] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h... [3] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.html#having-multiple-owners-of-mutable-data-by-combining-rct-and-refcellt https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...
    - duped 4y ago
      That would be pretty close to OCaml.
      - dvlsg 4y ago
        That's fair. My favorite language so far has been F#, so maybe it's some of that preference sneaking through.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I've tried learning Rust after learning Go, never really got into it. I also know C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, JS, and a couple others (Perl, anyone?) I find Rust syntax too complex, similar to C++ which I also avoid now.
- hhjinks 4y ago
  It's really frustrating to write, until it isn't. The language lets you be extremely expressive with about the same level of mental overhead as a garbage collected language. Once it "clicks," it's a joy to work with.
gary17the 4y ago
Well, you will probably think I'm crazy, but for me personally, having a couple of decades of C++ experience, learning Rust turned out to be much easier than learning... Swift. Yes, that famed, ultra-modern, great-as-your-first-programming-language Swift. Except for lifetime annotations and the borrow checker, Rust turned out to be much easier for my brain to parse and memorize than Swift, perhaps due to Rust's consistency and predictability and Swift's horrible language construct bloat.
- duped 4y ago
  Going from C++ to Rust is pretty much the easiest path, since most of the "hard" parts of Rust are just automating stuff you do by hand in C++ anyway. For other languages where people regularly get tripped up on "what's the stack vs the heap?" coming to Rust it's a bit of a different story, ime. Talking about which object "owns" another that a pointer "outlives" what it points to are totally normal parlance for C++ developers and completely foreign to a lot of other folks.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    I don't disagree but that says to me that a lot of the "Rust is hard" narrative is actually "low-level systems programming is hard", eg) domain complexity is being misattributed to the language.
  - palmtree3000 4y ago
    I came to rust from the other direction, as it were: from Haskell. There are a lot of similarities! The type systems are similar, with some name changes (sum types -> enums, typeclasses -> traits). Pattern matching is basically the same. Haskell uses (lazy) lists mostly the same way rust uses iterators. Ownership is new, but imposes some of the same requirements that immutability does (no cycles without shenanigans[0]). Rust requires that values are aliasable XOR mutable: Haskell does too (they're always aliasable and never mutable). [0] https://wiki.haskell.org/Tying_the_Knot https://wiki.haskell.org/Tying_the_Knot
    - chakkepolja 4y ago

by 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.
  - gary17the 4y ago
    You can approximate this already: forget Rust references (borrow checking + lifetimes; in other words, raw pointers) and start hacking with Rust using its shared ownership (reference-counted) smart pointers, immutable Rc<T>[1], mutable RefCell<T>[2] and the combination of the two[3]. The syntax will, overall, get considerably more dense than Go, but otherwise analogous to Go. Instead of GC cycles, memory will be freed incrementally, immediately when no longer in use. [1] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html [2] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h... [3] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.html#having-multiple-owners-of-mutable-data-by-combining-rct-and-refcellt https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...
  - duped 4y ago
    That would be pretty close to OCaml.
    - dvlsg 4y ago
      That's fair. My favorite language so far has been F#, so maybe it's some of that preference sneaking through.
icedchai 4y ago
I've tried learning Rust after learning Go, never really got into it. I also know C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, JS, and a couple others (Perl, anyone?) I find Rust syntax too complex, similar to C++ which I also avoid now.
hhjinks 4y ago
It's really frustrating to write, until it isn't. The language lets you be extremely expressive with about the same level of mental overhead as a garbage collected language. Once it "clicks," it's a joy to work with.

gary17the 4y ago

Well, you will probably think I'm crazy, but for me personally, having a couple of decades of C++ experience, learning Rust turned out to be much easier than learning... Swift. Yes, that famed, ultra-modern, great-as-your-first-programming-language Swift. Except for lifetime annotations and the borrow checker, Rust turned out to be much easier for my brain to parse and memorize than Swift, perhaps due to Rust's consistency and predictability and Swift's horrible language construct bloat.

duped 4y ago
Going from C++ to Rust is pretty much the easiest path, since most of the "hard" parts of Rust are just automating stuff you do by hand in C++ anyway. For other languages where people regularly get tripped up on "what's the stack vs the heap?" coming to Rust it's a bit of a different story, ime. Talking about which object "owns" another that a pointer "outlives" what it points to are totally normal parlance for C++ developers and completely foreign to a lot of other folks.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  I don't disagree but that says to me that a lot of the "Rust is hard" narrative is actually "low-level systems programming is hard", eg) domain complexity is being misattributed to the language.
- palmtree3000 4y ago
  I came to rust from the other direction, as it were: from Haskell. There are a lot of similarities! The type systems are similar, with some name changes (sum types -> enums, typeclasses -> traits). Pattern matching is basically the same. Haskell uses (lazy) lists mostly the same way rust uses iterators. Ownership is new, but imposes some of the same requirements that immutability does (no cycles without shenanigans[0]). Rust requires that values are aliasable XOR mutable: Haskell does too (they're always aliasable and never mutable). [0] https://wiki.haskell.org/Tying_the_Knot https://wiki.haskell.org/Tying_the_Knot
  - chakkepolja 4y ago