3 ms·

The borrow checker. The syntax. It isn't a good fit for my needs. It'd be like using a forklift to move a few books. I'm not generally a fan of strong explicit

by TylerE 4y ago

The borrow checker. The syntax. It isn't a good fit for my needs. It'd be like using a forklift to move a few books. I'm not generally a fan of strong explicit typing/high ceremony in general.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Curious, are you a fan of Typescript?
- TylerE 4y ago
  Never used it. I don't even have the need to touch vanilla javascript that often.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    What do you primarily program in, Java? C#? Python?
    - TylerE 4y ago
      Python
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        Then that makes a lot of sense why you might not like types. I'd say give Type Driven Development a try, where you layout the data flows for a program through its types, then you fill in the actual code which becomes very easy. I wrote about this in another comment before (in Rust, but you can even do it in Python with its type hinting): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454158#34492209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454158#34492209
smt88 4y ago
> strong explicit typing/high ceremony If you think strong typing is "ceremony" then you probably spend most of your time writing (and documenting) code and not reading, refactoring, or collaborating on it. The time people spend writing unnecessary, buggy unit tests (that static analysis can do in better languages) is far greater than the time to just use the type system. Most languages don't even force you to be explicit anymore. They infer the types, so you don't even write extra code. You just get better errors and speed.
- josephg 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, I agree with the GP comment when it comes to network services and for quickly prototyping things out. I’ve been writing in rust almost exclusively for the last few years, but I still reach for typescript from time to time. JS/TS just requires fewer decisions per line of code. As a pithy example, in javascript I don’t have to decide whether I want a String / &str / SmartString / Rc<String>, etc. It’s just string. When I pass a callback I don’t have to decide between accepting a closure or FnOnce/Fn/FnMut. Or decide whether to accept a function pointer or take a generic parameter. In javascript I never have to think about the lifetime of the callee’s stack. I tried to implement my own server-sent events style protocol in rust a couple years ago. I spent 2 weeks trying a bunch of different approaches but I eventually gave up - I just couldn’t get it working. (Mind you, async was pretty new then - I don’t think it was ready). I moved to javascript and had the whole thing working correctly in about a day and ~50 lines of simple code. I think the resulting program is much better when I write it in rust than what I get when I build on top of nodejs. Rust programs can be orders of magnitude faster and I have a shockingly low defect rate in shipped rust code. But there’s a trade off. Rust programs take more effort to write. Rust is a brilliant systems programming language. I’d pick it over C or C++ any day of the week. But not all problems are systems programming problems.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Rust programs take more effort to write initially, but less effort throughout the software lifecycle. Unless you're writing code just to throw it away and not even run it once (which practically doesn't ever happen, at least not intentionally) Rust front-loading the effort is the right trade off. Never mind that some of these choices you can just avoid by thinking in general terms and deferring optimization for later. Just passing String and FnMut everywhere will be a lot more efficient than whatever the JS translates to on the machine.
    - josephg 4y ago
      Huh? Rust is better if I ever run my program even once? Even when it takes significantly more effort to write? Hard disagree on that. > Just passing String and FnMut everywhere will be a lot more efficient than whatever the JS translates to on the machine. I can’t comment on the performance of FnMut, but I’ve seen rust code run slower than the equivalent javascript because the rust code in question allocates everywhere without thinking about it (via Vec, String and Box). In my mind, javascript and friends are good languages to build things fast. Rust is a good language to build things right. For plenty of software (eg websites), good enough is good enough.
echelon 4y ago
You don't see the borrow checker. It manifests itself in encouraging RAII inspired writing and logical flow. Lifetime annotations help how you use and exchange certain data, but you can get away without them unless you need them. For shared data structures (when synchronization primitives are too much) and highly performant code. You can write high level Java, Ruby, and Python code in Rust if you want to. Writing Actix or Axum web handlers feels no different than Golang or Python/Flask.
posix86 4y ago
Rust's type checker is very clever tough. You can omit types almost anywhere, and rust will infer it. Say you net a vector containing Foo object. You can just do let mut v = Vec::new(); v.push(m_foo); In fact it's so nice that you often rewrite code to keep clear what's actually happening, even though you could keep types largely implicit. Here's another example: let f: Vec<i32> = vec![1, 2]; let f2: HashSet<f32> = f.iter().map(|n|n.into()).collect();

by TylerE 4y ago

The borrow checker. The syntax. It isn't a good fit for my needs. It'd be like using a forklift to move a few books. I'm not generally a fan of strong explicit typing/high ceremony in general.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

Curious, are you a fan of Typescript?

TylerE 4y ago
Never used it. I don't even have the need to touch vanilla javascript that often.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  What do you primarily program in, Java? C#? Python?
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Python
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Then that makes a lot of sense why you might not like types. I'd say give Type Driven Development a try, where you layout the data flows for a program through its types, then you fill in the actual code which becomes very easy. I wrote about this in another comment before (in Rust, but you can even do it in Python with its type hinting): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454158#34492209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454158#34492209

smt88 4y ago

> strong explicit typing/high ceremony If you think strong typing is "ceremony" then you probably spend most of your time writing (and documenting) code and not reading, refactoring, or collaborating on it. The time people spend writing unnecessary, buggy unit tests (that static analysis can do in better languages) is far greater than the time to just use the type system. Most languages don't even force you to be explicit anymore. They infer the types, so you don't even write extra code. You just get better errors and speed.

josephg 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I agree with the GP comment when it comes to network services and for quickly prototyping things out. I’ve been writing in rust almost exclusively for the last few years, but I still reach for typescript from time to time. JS/TS just requires fewer decisions per line of code. As a pithy example, in javascript I don’t have to decide whether I want a String / &str / SmartString / Rc<String>, etc. It’s just string. When I pass a callback I don’t have to decide between accepting a closure or FnOnce/Fn/FnMut. Or decide whether to accept a function pointer or take a generic parameter. In javascript I never have to think about the lifetime of the callee’s stack. I tried to implement my own server-sent events style protocol in rust a couple years ago. I spent 2 weeks trying a bunch of different approaches but I eventually gave up - I just couldn’t get it working. (Mind you, async was pretty new then - I don’t think it was ready). I moved to javascript and had the whole thing working correctly in about a day and ~50 lines of simple code. I think the resulting program is much better when I write it in rust than what I get when I build on top of nodejs. Rust programs can be orders of magnitude faster and I have a shockingly low defect rate in shipped rust code. But there’s a trade off. Rust programs take more effort to write. Rust is a brilliant systems programming language. I’d pick it over C or C++ any day of the week. But not all problems are systems programming problems.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Rust programs take more effort to write initially, but less effort throughout the software lifecycle. Unless you're writing code just to throw it away and not even run it once (which practically doesn't ever happen, at least not intentionally) Rust front-loading the effort is the right trade off. Never mind that some of these choices you can just avoid by thinking in general terms and deferring optimization for later. Just passing String and FnMut everywhere will be a lot more efficient than whatever the JS translates to on the machine.
  - josephg 4y ago
    Huh? Rust is better if I ever run my program even once? Even when it takes significantly more effort to write? Hard disagree on that. > Just passing String and FnMut everywhere will be a lot more efficient than whatever the JS translates to on the machine. I can’t comment on the performance of FnMut, but I’ve seen rust code run slower than the equivalent javascript because the rust code in question allocates everywhere without thinking about it (via Vec, String and Box). In my mind, javascript and friends are good languages to build things fast. Rust is a good language to build things right. For plenty of software (eg websites), good enough is good enough.

echelon 4y ago

You don't see the borrow checker. It manifests itself in encouraging RAII inspired writing and logical flow. Lifetime annotations help how you use and exchange certain data, but you can get away without them unless you need them. For shared data structures (when synchronization primitives are too much) and highly performant code. You can write high level Java, Ruby, and Python code in Rust if you want to. Writing Actix or Axum web handlers feels no different than Golang or Python/Flask.

posix86 4y ago

Rust's type checker is very clever tough. You can omit types almost anywhere, and rust will infer it. Say you net a vector containing Foo object. You can just do let mut v = Vec::new(); v.push(m_foo); In fact it's so nice that you often rewrite code to keep clear what's actually happening, even though you could keep types largely implicit. Here's another example: let f: Vec<i32> = vec![1, 2]; let f2: HashSet<f32> = f.iter().map(|n|n.into()).collect();