6 ms·

I agree with a couple points here, specifically I agree that choosing a language based on it's community (and not it's ecosystem) is just silly. And we all know

I agree with a couple points here, specifically I agree that choosing a language based on it's community (and not it's ecosystem) is just silly. And we all know that async ended up being a bit of a thorn in rust's side. But yeah, rust is very much a systems language: so it will be forcing you to think about memory layout one way or the other. Idk how valid of a complaint that is when you really consider that, and specifically the other alternatives you have.

tptacek 2y ago
A complication of the "Rust is a systems programming language" thing is that people adopt definitions of "systems" of varying expansiveness to suit the situation. There are unquestionable systems programming domains --- the kernel is a great example, and one where it's easy to see why Rust is an exciting proposition; same with browsers, the "second OS" everyone runs --- and then more questionable domains. Is the framework-layer code for a CRUD web application "systems" code? How about a container orchestrator? This isn't a criticism of Rust, but rather of the framing we often use to compare Rust and (say) Python or Java.
- DiabloD3 2y ago
  "Systems programming language" has almost turned into a weird slur; instead of using it to refer to languages that can actually handle that task, they use it to attempt to pigeonhole a language into only that. As in, people don't realize being a "systems programming language" is extremely difficult to get right, and many languages simply can't handle that (and never will, as per internal design requirements unique to those languages); if a language gets that right, they're going to get everything else right too if people decided to use it for that.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    See, depending on your definition of "systems programming language", that is just wildly false. A language that nails all the details and ergonomics of expressing a kernel block device driver is almost necessarily going to be suboptimal for exploratory scientific computing or line-of-business app development. Again: this is about the term, not about the language. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is no one ur-language that is optimal for every problem domain!
    - DiabloD3 2y ago
      I don't think the people that use it as a slur actually define it. They use it to mean the language they don't like because they think it has some level of enforced complexity that takes away from the language instead of being an important feature of the language.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Yes: it's about the distinction between global GC and programmer-defined memory management. GC is about as straightforward a tradeoff as you can make: remove a very large class of programmer concerns in exchange for a different performance envelope. It is not reasonable to argue that Rust's memory management doesn't represent a point on a tradeoff space --- that people suggesting GC languages are better fits for some problems just don't grok Rust well enough. That's a common trope, and it's pretty obviously false, just as it would be false to say that kernels should just supply a GC runtime so we can write device drivers in Java.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Meanwhile there are companies doing just that, better let their management know how fool they are selling bare metal real time Java runtimes, Oberon, Go and C# based microkernels. Even more so the fools that given them money for such products. /s
        tptacek 2y ago
        Look, I know there are bare metal Java runtimes (I've done assessment projects for some of them), I just don't want to litigate the point. I'm fine with a definition of "kernel programming" that fits Linux and the NT kernel and nothing else.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        A quite reducing view of the computing world.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Rust makes you think about your memory layout, memory allocation and avoiding thereof, about the specific time you grab and release other resources, about specifics of your inter-thread interactions, etc. If such considerations are natural for your problem domain, you likely do "systems programming" and also happen know C, have an.opinion on Zig, etc. If such considerations are the noise which you wish your language would abstract away, then you likely do "application programming", and you can pick from a wide gamut of languages, from Ruby and Python to Typescript to Elixir and Pony to C#, Java, and Kotlin to OCaml and Haskell. You can be utterly productive with each.
  - sophacles 2y ago
    What does "think about your memory layout" mean? Can you provide an example? I've seen this brought up a few times on this thread and have no idea what people are referring to when they say it. As for the rest of your list - I'm not sure why rust is special in regards to "the specific time you grab and release resources" or "inter-thread interactions". Seriously - I have to think about when I acquire and release resources like sockets and file handles python, c, ocaml, java, c#, and every other language I've used. Its not like you can randomly call file.close() or close(fd) (in python and c respectively) and expect to be able to continue reading or writing the file later. Same for inter-thread interactions... all those languages have mutexes too. Like none of that is rust-specific, its just the consequence of using resources and threads in code.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Again, the subtext here is GC versus direct control of memory lifecycles, and it is probably not reasonable to argue that there isn't a tradeoff here --- that every application is as gracefully expressible in one as the other, so long as you "git gud" at it. Both sides of this debate are guilty of deploying that trope.
      - sophacles 2y ago
        I'm not arguing that there isn't a tradeoff, or about "git gud". I'm literally and genuinely baffled about how one can magically elide knowing if a file is open or closed (or the equivalent) when using a resource. Like I can't think of a single language that doesn't make you explicitly obtain resources, and most of the GC languages do the same thing as rust for casual closing - just let the handle go out of scope. Even for memory, a huge amount of the rust I write isn't performance code - I don't understand why it's a mental burden to write let x = vec![a, b, c]; When the equivalent in python is: x = [a, b, c] Nothing about either requires a lick of memory allocation thought, nor about memory layout. Sure in rust I have to think about what I'm going to do with that vec in rust and the mutation story up-front, but after enough lines of python I have also learned to think of that up front there too (ortherwise I know I'm going to be chasing down how I ended up mutating a copy of the list rather than the original list I wanted to mutate - usually because someone did list = $list_comprehension somewhere in the call stack before mutating). I'm not being disingenuous here - I literally don't understand the difference, it feels like an oddly targetted complaint about things that are just what computer languages do. To the best of my ability to determine the biggest differences between the languages aren't about what's simple and complex, but how the problems with the complex things express themselves. I mean it's not like getting a recursion limit error in python on a line that merely does "temp = some_object.foo" is straight-forward to deal with, or the problems with "for _, x := range foo { func() { stuff with x } }" are easy to understand/learn to work with - but I don't see people running around saying you shouldn't learn those languages because there's a bunch of hidden stupid crap to wrap your head around to be effective. (and yes, i did run into both those problems in my first week of using the languages) In all the languages there are wierd idioms and rules - some of them you get used to and some of them you structure your program around. Sometimes you learn to love it, and sometimes it annoys you to no end. In every case I've ever found it's either learn to work with the language or sign up for a world of pain, but if you choose the former everything gets easier. When a language makes something seem hard, but it seems easy in my favorite language, well, in that case I've discovered the complexity is there in both, but when it's hidden from me it limited my ability to see a vast array of options to explore and shown a whole new set of problem solving tools at my disposal. I still don't know what people mean when they talk about "having to think about memory layout"... like seriously to me it's: Thinking about pointer alignment and how to cast one struct into another in C... something I've only had to think about once in any language across a fairly wide range of tasks. If this is what's being referred to, I'm baffled about how it's coming up so much, but i suspect this isn't what people mean, and I don't know what they actually do mean.
- timeon 2y ago
  Yeah I use often Rust where Python would be enough. But unless I really need quick/interactive feedback (for exploratory stuff ie.: Jupyter with plots), Rust suits me well.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I enjoy expressing applications in C. Once a week, a story hits the front page here about someone shipping a web app in C. C suits me well. But I don't pretend that's an objectively reasonable engineering decision. It is not.

tptacek 2y ago

A complication of the "Rust is a systems programming language" thing is that people adopt definitions of "systems" of varying expansiveness to suit the situation. There are unquestionable systems programming domains --- the kernel is a great example, and one where it's easy to see why Rust is an exciting proposition; same with browsers, the "second OS" everyone runs --- and then more questionable domains. Is the framework-layer code for a CRUD web application "systems" code? How about a container orchestrator? This isn't a criticism of Rust, but rather of the framing we often use to compare Rust and (say) Python or Java.

DiabloD3 2y ago
"Systems programming language" has almost turned into a weird slur; instead of using it to refer to languages that can actually handle that task, they use it to attempt to pigeonhole a language into only that. As in, people don't realize being a "systems programming language" is extremely difficult to get right, and many languages simply can't handle that (and never will, as per internal design requirements unique to those languages); if a language gets that right, they're going to get everything else right too if people decided to use it for that.
- tptacek 2y ago
  See, depending on your definition of "systems programming language", that is just wildly false. A language that nails all the details and ergonomics of expressing a kernel block device driver is almost necessarily going to be suboptimal for exploratory scientific computing or line-of-business app development. Again: this is about the term, not about the language. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is no one ur-language that is optimal for every problem domain!
  - DiabloD3 2y ago
    I don't think the people that use it as a slur actually define it. They use it to mean the language they don't like because they think it has some level of enforced complexity that takes away from the language instead of being an important feature of the language.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Yes: it's about the distinction between global GC and programmer-defined memory management. GC is about as straightforward a tradeoff as you can make: remove a very large class of programmer concerns in exchange for a different performance envelope. It is not reasonable to argue that Rust's memory management doesn't represent a point on a tradeoff space --- that people suggesting GC languages are better fits for some problems just don't grok Rust well enough. That's a common trope, and it's pretty obviously false, just as it would be false to say that kernels should just supply a GC runtime so we can write device drivers in Java.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Meanwhile there are companies doing just that, better let their management know how fool they are selling bare metal real time Java runtimes, Oberon, Go and C# based microkernels. Even more so the fools that given them money for such products. /s
        tptacek 2y ago
        Look, I know there are bare metal Java runtimes (I've done assessment projects for some of them), I just don't want to litigate the point. I'm fine with a definition of "kernel programming" that fits Linux and the NT kernel and nothing else.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        A quite reducing view of the computing world.
nine_k 2y ago
Rust makes you think about your memory layout, memory allocation and avoiding thereof, about the specific time you grab and release other resources, about specifics of your inter-thread interactions, etc. If such considerations are natural for your problem domain, you likely do "systems programming" and also happen know C, have an.opinion on Zig, etc. If such considerations are the noise which you wish your language would abstract away, then you likely do "application programming", and you can pick from a wide gamut of languages, from Ruby and Python to Typescript to Elixir and Pony to C#, Java, and Kotlin to OCaml and Haskell. You can be utterly productive with each.
- sophacles 2y ago
  What does "think about your memory layout" mean? Can you provide an example? I've seen this brought up a few times on this thread and have no idea what people are referring to when they say it. As for the rest of your list - I'm not sure why rust is special in regards to "the specific time you grab and release resources" or "inter-thread interactions". Seriously - I have to think about when I acquire and release resources like sockets and file handles python, c, ocaml, java, c#, and every other language I've used. Its not like you can randomly call file.close() or close(fd) (in python and c respectively) and expect to be able to continue reading or writing the file later. Same for inter-thread interactions... all those languages have mutexes too. Like none of that is rust-specific, its just the consequence of using resources and threads in code.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Again, the subtext here is GC versus direct control of memory lifecycles, and it is probably not reasonable to argue that there isn't a tradeoff here --- that every application is as gracefully expressible in one as the other, so long as you "git gud" at it. Both sides of this debate are guilty of deploying that trope.
    - sophacles 2y ago
      I'm not arguing that there isn't a tradeoff, or about "git gud". I'm literally and genuinely baffled about how one can magically elide knowing if a file is open or closed (or the equivalent) when using a resource. Like I can't think of a single language that doesn't make you explicitly obtain resources, and most of the GC languages do the same thing as rust for casual closing - just let the handle go out of scope. Even for memory, a huge amount of the rust I write isn't performance code - I don't understand why it's a mental burden to write let x = vec![a, b, c]; When the equivalent in python is: x = [a, b, c] Nothing about either requires a lick of memory allocation thought, nor about memory layout. Sure in rust I have to think about what I'm going to do with that vec in rust and the mutation story up-front, but after enough lines of python I have also learned to think of that up front there too (ortherwise I know I'm going to be chasing down how I ended up mutating a copy of the list rather than the original list I wanted to mutate - usually because someone did list = $list_comprehension somewhere in the call stack before mutating). I'm not being disingenuous here - I literally don't understand the difference, it feels like an oddly targetted complaint about things that are just what computer languages do. To the best of my ability to determine the biggest differences between the languages aren't about what's simple and complex, but how the problems with the complex things express themselves. I mean it's not like getting a recursion limit error in python on a line that merely does "temp = some_object.foo" is straight-forward to deal with, or the problems with "for _, x := range foo { func() { stuff with x } }" are easy to understand/learn to work with - but I don't see people running around saying you shouldn't learn those languages because there's a bunch of hidden stupid crap to wrap your head around to be effective. (and yes, i did run into both those problems in my first week of using the languages) In all the languages there are wierd idioms and rules - some of them you get used to and some of them you structure your program around. Sometimes you learn to love it, and sometimes it annoys you to no end. In every case I've ever found it's either learn to work with the language or sign up for a world of pain, but if you choose the former everything gets easier. When a language makes something seem hard, but it seems easy in my favorite language, well, in that case I've discovered the complexity is there in both, but when it's hidden from me it limited my ability to see a vast array of options to explore and shown a whole new set of problem solving tools at my disposal. I still don't know what people mean when they talk about "having to think about memory layout"... like seriously to me it's: Thinking about pointer alignment and how to cast one struct into another in C... something I've only had to think about once in any language across a fairly wide range of tasks. If this is what's being referred to, I'm baffled about how it's coming up so much, but i suspect this isn't what people mean, and I don't know what they actually do mean.
timeon 2y ago
Yeah I use often Rust where Python would be enough. But unless I really need quick/interactive feedback (for exploratory stuff ie.: Jupyter with plots), Rust suits me well.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I enjoy expressing applications in C. Once a week, a story hits the front page here about someone shipping a web app in C. C suits me well. But I don't pretend that's an objectively reasonable engineering decision. It is not.