3 ms·

Learning curve is straight up for many with the borrow checker, but once you are over that hump, and it comes pretty quick for most, Rust is no harder than any

Learning curve is straight up for many with the borrow checker, but once you are over that hump, and it comes pretty quick for most, Rust is no harder than any other language.

moldavi 4y ago
Easier than C or C++ for sure. But I definitely wouldn't say that Rust as easy as a GC'd language like Java or Go. They have strictly less constraints to deal with, they can let you use the simplest pattern for the situation, and (in my experience) they have less superfluous refactoring sessions due to the overly conservative nature of the borrow checker. I like how Matt Welsh put it in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454 https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...: > What really bites is when you need to change the type signature of a load-bearing interface and find yourself spending hours changing every place where the type is used only to see if your initial stab at something is feasible. And then redoing all of that work when you realize you need to change it again. Perhaps you're instead speaking of a specific situation or kind of program where the borrow checker happens to be no harder than any other language?
tgv 4y ago
In my experience, it depends heavily on the kind of thing you're writing. I could write some small programs in it, no problem: a rather complex, text-based calculator was easy and elegant to write with function arguments, a game server monitor, some tools for a cryptography course, an FFT analyzer that reads from WAV or AIFF, etc. Then I tried to port my rather efficient Earley parser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley_parser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley_parser) from C. Constructing the item set efficiently wasn't that hard, but constructing the forest (set of syntactic trees) was. In C, it was basically free by using some pointer sharing, but I couldn't get that done in Rust. Perhaps there's some clever trick I couldn't think of, but I couldn't get it anywhere near C's speed. And since the ultimate goal of that parser includes further memory shenanigans (unification of results yielded by the rules), I dropped the project. At my job, I'm writing in Go. I fairly sure I could easily port the C code to that. It would probably run a bit slower, but the algorithm and data structures would be readable, and extendable. So: it depends.

Learning curve is straight up for many with the borrow checker, but once you are over that hump, and it comes pretty quick for most, Rust is no harder than any other language.

moldavi 4y ago

Easier than C or C++ for sure. But I definitely wouldn't say that Rust as easy as a GC'd language like Java or Go. They have strictly less constraints to deal with, they can let you use the simplest pattern for the situation, and (in my experience) they have less superfluous refactoring sessions due to the overly conservative nature of the borrow checker. I like how Matt Welsh put it in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454 https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautio...: > What really bites is when you need to change the type signature of a load-bearing interface and find yourself spending hours changing every place where the type is used only to see if your initial stab at something is feasible. And then redoing all of that work when you realize you need to change it again. Perhaps you're instead speaking of a specific situation or kind of program where the borrow checker happens to be no harder than any other language?

tgv 4y ago

In my experience, it depends heavily on the kind of thing you're writing. I could write some small programs in it, no problem: a rather complex, text-based calculator was easy and elegant to write with function arguments, a game server monitor, some tools for a cryptography course, an FFT analyzer that reads from WAV or AIFF, etc. Then I tried to port my rather efficient Earley parser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley_parser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earley_parser) from C. Constructing the item set efficiently wasn't that hard, but constructing the forest (set of syntactic trees) was. In C, it was basically free by using some pointer sharing, but I couldn't get that done in Rust. Perhaps there's some clever trick I couldn't think of, but I couldn't get it anywhere near C's speed. And since the ultimate goal of that parser includes further memory shenanigans (unification of results yielded by the rules), I dropped the project. At my job, I'm writing in Go. I fairly sure I could easily port the C code to that. It would probably run a bit slower, but the algorithm and data structures would be readable, and extendable. So: it depends.