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I think this quote also applies more generally: > It's easier to work with than C++, but that's fairly faint praise. So, while Rust positions itself as a C++

by rob74 3y ago

I think this quote also applies more generally: > It's easier to work with than C++, but that's fairly faint praise. So, while Rust positions itself as a C++ alternative with all the complexities that C++ developers love, it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust...

smabie 3y ago
There's tons of existing languages that are mostly okay that you can develop a webapp in. Rust as a C++ replacement serves a real unmet need in the marketplace.
deleted 3y ago
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devjab 3y ago
We build a proof-of-concept backend replacement for what is essentially “SharePoint being used as a DB with a frontend by people who don’t know how to use SharePoint” and was a nice experience. We also build it in a few other languages, C#, Go, Python and TypeScript and Rust was probably the best experience of them all. We ended up going with C# because we needed Odata, and at the time we hadn’t yet run into the many “joys” of working with Odata, ASP and Entity Framework and how their model builders, really, really, really, won’t play together nicely. Knowing what we know now, we should’ve gone with TypeScript and just written our own Odata filter on top of it, but live and learn. If I was in a position where I could pick and chose languages, and not worry about how not having TypeScript in most things will mean our best front-end developer can never go on vacation because he’s sort of our only front-end developer, I wouldn’t mind using Rust for web-backends. Rust GUI is obviously not a great experience. At least not yet. But it’s not that bad either. I think it’s mostly the case of how JavaScript is just so good at it and seeing such a fast pace of improvements because the entire world uses it for most GUIs these days, that it’s just hard for anything else to compete. I mean, look at stuff like Flutter or Blazor, they are backed by Microsoft and Google and they’re vastly inferior choices for most use cases compared to simply building things in React, ReactNative or even electron, and that’s not because I have some wild love for JavaScript, it’s because it’s seeing rapid improvements they dwarf it’s competition simply by being used by a lot of people. I wish Rust would have someone like Facebook pick it up and build a frontend framework for it, but I think that is just too unlikely for you to bet on, and you certainly wouldn’t want to do it yourself, even as open source because then that would probably be your entire job. On the flip-side, the packages that handle basic back-end web stuff for Enterprise use are rock solid in Rust. Which is impressive, at least to me, considering it’s young age. I have no idea why, but maybe some serious players are contributing to it because they use it themselves. There isn’t a “Django” or Ruby+Rails for Rust, but if what you’re building is a lot of smaller APIs with various transport methods and data access in an federated authentication scenario then Rust is surprisingly mature for the web. It’s primary disadvantage being that your TypeScript and Rust developers won’t be able to cover for each other (which is why we didn’t poc with Java).
- internetter 3y ago
  > I wish Rust would have someone like Facebook pick it up and build a frontend framework for it We have yew, and my personal favourite: leptos (https://leptos.dev/ https://leptos.dev/)
  - lumb63 3y ago
    As someone who recently started their first web app in Rust and is using Yew for the front-end, I wish they included benchmarks against other Rust frameworks. I also wish I had more experience and had looked harder; Yew is very verbose in my experience and Leptos looks a little more sane.
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case? Basically none of Rust's value proposition exists for a web app while nearly every single one of the downsides do.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Hard disagree. Rust brings a lot to the table for a web app. Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. You can even go as far as compiled templates. Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great. Dependency management is best in class. I rather like diesel.rs (although it is very much an acquired taste) especially if you treat it like a safe query builder rather than an ORM. The single biggest problem I've run into is that there's no real good story for a web app framework (especially since everyone's gone crazy over async). Rocket is perhaps a bit too magical for rust folks and it's been abandoned, but I rather liked it. I've warmed up to axum, but all this async stuff still rubs me the wrong way. And, yes, compile times still suck.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Arguably TypeScript is pretty close to as safe while being less work.
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      Perhaps. But TS is still Javascript under the hood which means implementation details leak and they smell awful. If they didn't it'd come down to a preference for compiled vs interpreted. The number one syntactical beef I've is operators. e.g. == vs ===, ""+number.
  - vsnf 3y ago
    Although all of those things are true, I think the main point being made is why choose Rust for that, instead of Go, .NET, etc, any of which offer everything you've outlined as being worth having, while having fewer of the downsides of Rust.
moonchrome 3y ago
>So, while Rust positions itself as a C++ alternative with all the complexities that C++ developers love, it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... But we already have plenty of options for this use case (.NET, JVM, Go, Python, Ruby, node.js, PHP, Erlang, etc. etc.). Very mature ecosystems that solve a lot of different edge cases. There are very few C++ alternatives worth mentioning, none as mature as Rust in terms of adoption/tooling. If you need to write a webapp that would require C/C++ kind of memory handling/performance then Rust would be the ideal candidate I think. I don't know what kind of tradeoff matrix makes you use the Rust graydon describes over the existing options. For example my main issue with D (but TBH that's something I've given up on actively tracking 10 years ago probably) is that by including GC in the runtime/stdlib - it basically painted itself as a poorly supported competitor to C# rather than a C++ replacement.
deleted 3y ago
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by rob74 3y ago

smabie 3y ago

There's tons of existing languages that are mostly okay that you can develop a webapp in. Rust as a C++ replacement serves a real unmet need in the marketplace.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

devjab 3y ago

We build a proof-of-concept backend replacement for what is essentially “SharePoint being used as a DB with a frontend by people who don’t know how to use SharePoint” and was a nice experience. We also build it in a few other languages, C#, Go, Python and TypeScript and Rust was probably the best experience of them all. We ended up going with C# because we needed Odata, and at the time we hadn’t yet run into the many “joys” of working with Odata, ASP and Entity Framework and how their model builders, really, really, really, won’t play together nicely. Knowing what we know now, we should’ve gone with TypeScript and just written our own Odata filter on top of it, but live and learn. If I was in a position where I could pick and chose languages, and not worry about how not having TypeScript in most things will mean our best front-end developer can never go on vacation because he’s sort of our only front-end developer, I wouldn’t mind using Rust for web-backends. Rust GUI is obviously not a great experience. At least not yet. But it’s not that bad either. I think it’s mostly the case of how JavaScript is just so good at it and seeing such a fast pace of improvements because the entire world uses it for most GUIs these days, that it’s just hard for anything else to compete. I mean, look at stuff like Flutter or Blazor, they are backed by Microsoft and Google and they’re vastly inferior choices for most use cases compared to simply building things in React, ReactNative or even electron, and that’s not because I have some wild love for JavaScript, it’s because it’s seeing rapid improvements they dwarf it’s competition simply by being used by a lot of people. I wish Rust would have someone like Facebook pick it up and build a frontend framework for it, but I think that is just too unlikely for you to bet on, and you certainly wouldn’t want to do it yourself, even as open source because then that would probably be your entire job. On the flip-side, the packages that handle basic back-end web stuff for Enterprise use are rock solid in Rust. Which is impressive, at least to me, considering it’s young age. I have no idea why, but maybe some serious players are contributing to it because they use it themselves. There isn’t a “Django” or Ruby+Rails for Rust, but if what you’re building is a lot of smaller APIs with various transport methods and data access in an federated authentication scenario then Rust is surprisingly mature for the web. It’s primary disadvantage being that your TypeScript and Rust developers won’t be able to cover for each other (which is why we didn’t poc with Java).

internetter 3y ago
> I wish Rust would have someone like Facebook pick it up and build a frontend framework for it We have yew, and my personal favourite: leptos (https://leptos.dev/ https://leptos.dev/)
- lumb63 3y ago
  As someone who recently started their first web app in Rust and is using Yew for the front-end, I wish they included benchmarks against other Rust frameworks. I also wish I had more experience and had looked harder; Yew is very verbose in my experience and Leptos looks a little more sane.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

> it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... I mean who'd want to and why bother trying to support that use case? Basically none of Rust's value proposition exists for a web app while nearly every single one of the downsides do.

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Hard disagree. Rust brings a lot to the table for a web app. Compiled vs interpreted makes it easier to catch (syntax) errors beforehand. You can even go as far as compiled templates. Mapping JSON (or whatever) to strongly typed objects is great. Dependency management is best in class. I rather like diesel.rs (although it is very much an acquired taste) especially if you treat it like a safe query builder rather than an ORM. The single biggest problem I've run into is that there's no real good story for a web app framework (especially since everyone's gone crazy over async). Rocket is perhaps a bit too magical for rust folks and it's been abandoned, but I rather liked it. I've warmed up to axum, but all this async stuff still rubs me the wrong way. And, yes, compile times still suck.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Arguably TypeScript is pretty close to as safe while being less work.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Perhaps. But TS is still Javascript under the hood which means implementation details leak and they smell awful. If they didn't it'd come down to a preference for compiled vs interpreted. The number one syntactical beef I've is operators. e.g. == vs ===, ""+number.
- vsnf 3y ago
  Although all of those things are true, I think the main point being made is why choose Rust for that, instead of Go, .NET, etc, any of which offer everything you've outlined as being worth having, while having fewer of the downsides of Rust.

moonchrome 3y ago

>So, while Rust positions itself as a C++ alternative with all the complexities that C++ developers love, it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust... But we already have plenty of options for this use case (.NET, JVM, Go, Python, Ruby, node.js, PHP, Erlang, etc. etc.). Very mature ecosystems that solve a lot of different edge cases. There are very few C++ alternatives worth mentioning, none as mature as Rust in terms of adoption/tooling. If you need to write a webapp that would require C/C++ kind of memory handling/performance then Rust would be the ideal candidate I think. I don't know what kind of tradeoff matrix makes you use the Rust graydon describes over the existing options. For example my main issue with D (but TBH that's something I've given up on actively tracking 10 years ago probably) is that by including GC in the runtime/stdlib - it basically painted itself as a poorly supported competitor to C# rather than a C++ replacement.

deleted 3y ago

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