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Are they? I worked with bioinformaticians and now physicists and rust has never come up. > Köster, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, was look
by okasaki 4y ago
Are they? I worked with bioinformaticians and now physicists and rust has never come up.
> Köster, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, was looking for a language that offered the “expressiveness” of Python but the speed of languages such as C and C++. In other words, “a high-performance language that is still, let’s say, ergonomic to use”, he explains. What he found was Rust.
He must not have looked very far. There are much better options if you're looking for the expressiveness of Python. Personally I'm very fond of Nim.
- WaxProlix 4y agoNim seems to have adopted a lot of the trappings of rust in the last few years. Sort of weird he didn't see Julia first, as it's explicitly aimed at this group.
- igorkraw 4y agoSpeaking as someone who has built things in python, rust and Julia,I have to say that while I love multiple dispatch and the possibilities the Julia ecosystem offers, I'm not surprised he went to Rust over Julia: it's not much slower to hack in (as in, change some code, try running things, see what breaks, fix) because cargo check will catch a lot of errors before actually running things and you can stub things with "todo!()", but it manages complexity much better (if you lean on the typesystem and your code compiles, it's usually almost done), integrates easier into other ecosystems (cbindgen, pyo3)and the finished product will start up faster
- ansgri 4y agoRust seems to get serious corporate support, which future-proofs it and guarantees ecosystem growth. Not sure about Nim. Edit: others mentioned Julia, and it indeed looks like a valid choice since they don’t seem to program embedded or safety-critical stuff.
- okasaki 4y agoWell, maybe, but IME expecting scientists to have high level thoughts like that about programming language ecosystems is expecting too much.
- krageon 4y agoNim is very niche and doesn't have nearly the reach or possibilities that Rust does. In terms of expressiveness it's not all that different in practice.
- isofruit 4y agoYou'd need to expand on possibilities because the only factor I could see where that's remotely true would be the current size of the ecosystem.
- isofruit 4y agoYeh, that tracks with my experience. I'd imagine nim to be a somewhat nice learning experience if one already is used to python and the indentation. And with nimpy the integration into existing python codebases is pretty smooth sailing.