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This is so cool, and I love that Rust is being so heavily driven by the pragmatic needs of an ambitious project like this. As a systems guy, Rust is the most e

This is so cool, and I love that Rust is being so heavily driven by the pragmatic needs of an ambitious project like this. As a systems guy, Rust is the most excited I've been about a new language in years.

shmerl 13y ago
Yes, Rust is very promising especially if you look for better alternatives for C++. I wish it would stabilize and someone could write an in depth and well structured book on it. I have easier time learning languages that way, when ideas are explained and well presented, rather than deducing it all from very lacking documentation. In case of Rust it's even more difficult since it's packed with new ideas.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > I wish it would stabilize Should be later this year. > and someone could write an in depth and well structured book on it. Give me some time. ;)
  - cgh 13y ago
    Let me first say I really loved your Rust intro and I'll be buying any new book you produce. Question: are there any moderate-sized codebases (ie not Servo, not Rust itself) that can be used to show idiomatic Rust? In my own experimentation (a simple image utility to resize images and convert to b&w), I ended up writing it a lot like I would C, which I know isn't correct based on snippets I've seen. Or rather, it's correct in that it works, but it's not particularly idiomatic and the Rust elite would sneer at me. It's like the early days of C++ when people were writing it as "C with classes", complete with pointers everywhere, malloc, etc. A lot of that could have been mitigated with some easily digestible source that clearly demonstrates the idioms. Maybe a small game, a simple text editor, etc.? Does anyone know of anything like this? Or is it too soon for this?
    - lastontheboat 13y ago
      You might be interested in the ongoing reconstruction of Cave Story written in Rust: https://github.com/drbawb/rust-story https://github.com/drbawb/rust-story
      - cgh 13y ago
        Yes, this is the size of project I'm talking about. Thanks for pointing this out.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Thanks. I am currently finishing up "Rails 4 in Action" and "Designing Hypermedia APIs," which I've both been working on for far too long. In this sense, I don't mind that Rust isn't ready for a full book. ;) I am not entirely sure that 'idiomatic Rust' is something that's fully figured out yet. Rust itself is _certainly_ not idiomatic, as it's a hodge-podge of several historical coding styles. As I said when I spoke at the Bay Area Meetup, my position in Rust is 'eternal newbie,' so I'm not actually the best one to ask here. Maybe pcwalton can chime in.
    - menriquez 13y ago
      "...but it's not particularly idiomatic and the Rust elite would sneer at me." OMFG..and in this day and age is soooooo much more important not to be sneered at by the "elite" then it is to have working code... man do i miss the days when programming was about getting stuff working not worrying about the political and social impact of how your style was...
      - cgh 13y ago
        I think something was lost in translation here (assuming you aren't a native English speaker). This was a joke.
      - duaneb 13y ago
        Working code is far less valuable than maintainable code. EDIT: not always, of course, but unless it's a one-off tool, it doesn't make a lot of sense to NOT be idiomatic.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Thanks, I'm looking forward to it :)
- rdtsc 13y ago
  > Yes, Rust is very promising especially if you look for better alternatives for C++. Go kind of wanted that prize. It didn't quite get it. Many will say how they care about cool features, built-in concurrency, nice stuff and in the end, when comes to releasing product if performance isn't there, it won't replace C++. Some program in C++ because they love the language. They really do. There are people like that, I've met one, once. Quite often others do it because the rest of their world does (libraries, coworkers) and performance. The niche were performance matters (and I understand that is a loaded word so to speak) is going to be hard to get into.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I do like C++, have my bookshelf full of C++ books and magazines since the C++ ARM days, still follow C++ standard even if I nowadays tend to spend more time with other languages.
  - Sammi 13y ago
    Go was never supposed to replace C++, it was supposed to replace Java in server applications. Happily it seems Python and Ruby developers are finding good use in Go too. How was a garbage collection language ever supposed to take the place of a manual memory management language? The area that C++ shines in is systems programming, and you can't do that with Go, because of garbage collection. Rust on the other hand, is precisely made for systems programming.
    - scribu 13y ago
      > Go was never supposed to replace C++, it was supposed to replace Java in server applications. That is simply not the case. Rob Pike himself describes how we was working on a large C++ application when he thought of creating Go: http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Go doesn't address concurrency design deficiencies of C++ in any way, while Rust does. So I don't see Go as a next generation successor, but Rust really looks that way. I like C++ personally for its power and keeping performance accessible (especially with new developments of C++11 and beyond). And looking at new alternatives, Rust looks more like a successor to me than Go. As others pointed out, Rust doesn't enforce garbage collection, while Go does. For example if someone would want to write a demanding game, they wouldn't do it with garbage collection enforced language.

shmerl 13y ago

Yes, Rust is very promising especially if you look for better alternatives for C++. I wish it would stabilize and someone could write an in depth and well structured book on it. I have easier time learning languages that way, when ideas are explained and well presented, rather than deducing it all from very lacking documentation. In case of Rust it's even more difficult since it's packed with new ideas.

steveklabnik 13y ago
> I wish it would stabilize Should be later this year. > and someone could write an in depth and well structured book on it. Give me some time. ;)
- cgh 13y ago
  Let me first say I really loved your Rust intro and I'll be buying any new book you produce. Question: are there any moderate-sized codebases (ie not Servo, not Rust itself) that can be used to show idiomatic Rust? In my own experimentation (a simple image utility to resize images and convert to b&w), I ended up writing it a lot like I would C, which I know isn't correct based on snippets I've seen. Or rather, it's correct in that it works, but it's not particularly idiomatic and the Rust elite would sneer at me. It's like the early days of C++ when people were writing it as "C with classes", complete with pointers everywhere, malloc, etc. A lot of that could have been mitigated with some easily digestible source that clearly demonstrates the idioms. Maybe a small game, a simple text editor, etc.? Does anyone know of anything like this? Or is it too soon for this?
  - lastontheboat 13y ago
    You might be interested in the ongoing reconstruction of Cave Story written in Rust: https://github.com/drbawb/rust-story https://github.com/drbawb/rust-story
    - cgh 13y ago
      Yes, this is the size of project I'm talking about. Thanks for pointing this out.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Thanks. I am currently finishing up "Rails 4 in Action" and "Designing Hypermedia APIs," which I've both been working on for far too long. In this sense, I don't mind that Rust isn't ready for a full book. ;) I am not entirely sure that 'idiomatic Rust' is something that's fully figured out yet. Rust itself is _certainly_ not idiomatic, as it's a hodge-podge of several historical coding styles. As I said when I spoke at the Bay Area Meetup, my position in Rust is 'eternal newbie,' so I'm not actually the best one to ask here. Maybe pcwalton can chime in.
  - menriquez 13y ago
    "...but it's not particularly idiomatic and the Rust elite would sneer at me." OMFG..and in this day and age is soooooo much more important not to be sneered at by the "elite" then it is to have working code... man do i miss the days when programming was about getting stuff working not worrying about the political and social impact of how your style was...
    - cgh 13y ago
      I think something was lost in translation here (assuming you aren't a native English speaker). This was a joke.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      Working code is far less valuable than maintainable code. EDIT: not always, of course, but unless it's a one-off tool, it doesn't make a lot of sense to NOT be idiomatic.
- shmerl 13y ago
  Thanks, I'm looking forward to it :)
rdtsc 13y ago
> Yes, Rust is very promising especially if you look for better alternatives for C++. Go kind of wanted that prize. It didn't quite get it. Many will say how they care about cool features, built-in concurrency, nice stuff and in the end, when comes to releasing product if performance isn't there, it won't replace C++. Some program in C++ because they love the language. They really do. There are people like that, I've met one, once. Quite often others do it because the rest of their world does (libraries, coworkers) and performance. The niche were performance matters (and I understand that is a loaded word so to speak) is going to be hard to get into.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  I do like C++, have my bookshelf full of C++ books and magazines since the C++ ARM days, still follow C++ standard even if I nowadays tend to spend more time with other languages.
- Sammi 13y ago
  Go was never supposed to replace C++, it was supposed to replace Java in server applications. Happily it seems Python and Ruby developers are finding good use in Go too. How was a garbage collection language ever supposed to take the place of a manual memory management language? The area that C++ shines in is systems programming, and you can't do that with Go, because of garbage collection. Rust on the other hand, is precisely made for systems programming.
  - scribu 13y ago
    > Go was never supposed to replace C++, it was supposed to replace Java in server applications. That is simply not the case. Rob Pike himself describes how we was working on a large C++ application when he thought of creating Go: http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...
- shmerl 13y ago
  Go doesn't address concurrency design deficiencies of C++ in any way, while Rust does. So I don't see Go as a next generation successor, but Rust really looks that way. I like C++ personally for its power and keeping performance accessible (especially with new developments of C++11 and beyond). And looking at new alternatives, Rust looks more like a successor to me than Go. As others pointed out, Rust doesn't enforce garbage collection, while Go does. For example if someone would want to write a demanding game, they wouldn't do it with garbage collection enforced language.