6 ms·

I rarely have to do anything as low-level as rust would demand. More often than not I find myself using Python, but I had the same feelings when I started looki

I rarely have to do anything as low-level as rust would demand. More often than not I find myself using Python, but I had the same feelings when I started looking into rust a few weeks ago. It was exciting seeing the full pattern-matching, especially. I have a desire to get some experience in the area, but the problem is what to make. Does anyone have any ideas for some smallish libraries that would benefit the community? I'm certainly not a networking or concurrency expert, so it's difficult to come up with ideas.

bjz_ 12y ago
What kind of areas are you interested/experienced in? What would you like to learn? I'm sure there are tons of gaps out there that you could help fill. Maybe the folks on irc.mozilla.org #rust might be able to give you some ideas.
- jonesetc 12y ago
  Thanks. I'll definitely try out irc for some ideas. My general projects are small automation tasks for myself as well as small web-based apps for myself and friends. That's part of why coming up with ideas for something like rust are a little tricky. The only promising thought I've had is maybe implementing some sort of template preprocessor that I can find a way to work into an existing rust framework.
zem 12y ago
you might also like ocaml as a higher-level language with a lot of the same features.
- mercurial 12y ago
  Yes. Rust borrows quite a few things from the ML family of languages (and things unique to Haskell like "deriving"). OCaml has the advantage of offering very good performance while not having to deal with the borrow checker, but it doesn't have the momentum behind Rust (the community is quite small, and the number of libraries isn't that large). That said, it is a very nice language to work with, and offers a number of features absent from Rust, such as a great module system, structural typing, first-class laziness...
  - stock_toaster 12y ago
    > OCaml has the advantage of offering very good performance > while not having to deal with the borrow checker My understanding was that OCaml had no support for parallelism -- so a single core is all you get. Is that not the case?
    - mercurial 12y ago
      That's true, though through Lwt (and Core.Async) it has good support for concurrency. However, the work on the parallel runtime seems to progressing at a steady pace, so parallelism is coming.
      - stock_toaster 12y ago
        Ah. Thanks for the info!
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      No. It does support parallelism and concurrency. The biggest issue is that the runtime still has a global lock, but it is in the process of being removed.
    - masklinn 12y ago
      OCaml does have concurrency and parallelism support, but it has a GIL so their effectiveness is somewhat limited unless you go multiprocess. I believe there are serious efforts towards removing the GIL these days.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    > but it doesn't have the momentum behind Rust (the community is quite small, and the number of libraries isn't that large) How come, given the amount of use it gets in the industry and academia versus Rust that still hasn't reached 1.0?
    - mercurial 12y ago
      That's a good question. I think F# and Haskell have stolen a fair amount of OCaml's thunder. Meanwhile, Rust caters to everybody who is tired of C/C++ (putting D in the same position as OCaml, I guess?), while having nice enough constructs that people coming from high-level languages get interested in it. By contrast, OCaml doesn't have the "shiny new" feeling of Rust (also suffers from other issues, such as its standard library/libraries, and the tooling, and the "mlis are documentation" attitude that is fairly prevalent in the community). I'd say with more polish and a lot of marketing, it could easily gain more market share (even though some things have gotten much better since opam). Sometimes, working in OCaml feels like flying a starship equipped with XVIIIth century cannons. The awesomeness of many of its features is in stark contrast to the gaping holes of its ecosystem (no good INI parsing library in 2014? no usable pure OCaml regexp library?).
aethertap 12y ago
I've been thinking about implementing fastcgi so that I could play with simple rust webapps. Haven't had time to start on it though, so if that sounds interesting you'd have at least one immediate user.
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  Instead of FastCGI just speak HTTP. And for those there are libraries already.
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    Or 0MQ to talk to Mongrel2.

bjz_ 12y ago

What kind of areas are you interested/experienced in? What would you like to learn? I'm sure there are tons of gaps out there that you could help fill. Maybe the folks on irc.mozilla.org #rust might be able to give you some ideas.

jonesetc 12y ago
Thanks. I'll definitely try out irc for some ideas. My general projects are small automation tasks for myself as well as small web-based apps for myself and friends. That's part of why coming up with ideas for something like rust are a little tricky. The only promising thought I've had is maybe implementing some sort of template preprocessor that I can find a way to work into an existing rust framework.

zem 12y ago

you might also like ocaml as a higher-level language with a lot of the same features.

mercurial 12y ago
Yes. Rust borrows quite a few things from the ML family of languages (and things unique to Haskell like "deriving"). OCaml has the advantage of offering very good performance while not having to deal with the borrow checker, but it doesn't have the momentum behind Rust (the community is quite small, and the number of libraries isn't that large). That said, it is a very nice language to work with, and offers a number of features absent from Rust, such as a great module system, structural typing, first-class laziness...
- stock_toaster 12y ago
  > OCaml has the advantage of offering very good performance > while not having to deal with the borrow checker My understanding was that OCaml had no support for parallelism -- so a single core is all you get. Is that not the case?
  - mercurial 12y ago
    That's true, though through Lwt (and Core.Async) it has good support for concurrency. However, the work on the parallel runtime seems to progressing at a steady pace, so parallelism is coming.
    - stock_toaster 12y ago
      Ah. Thanks for the info!
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    No. It does support parallelism and concurrency. The biggest issue is that the runtime still has a global lock, but it is in the process of being removed.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    OCaml does have concurrency and parallelism support, but it has a GIL so their effectiveness is somewhat limited unless you go multiprocess. I believe there are serious efforts towards removing the GIL these days.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > but it doesn't have the momentum behind Rust (the community is quite small, and the number of libraries isn't that large) How come, given the amount of use it gets in the industry and academia versus Rust that still hasn't reached 1.0?
  - mercurial 12y ago
    That's a good question. I think F# and Haskell have stolen a fair amount of OCaml's thunder. Meanwhile, Rust caters to everybody who is tired of C/C++ (putting D in the same position as OCaml, I guess?), while having nice enough constructs that people coming from high-level languages get interested in it. By contrast, OCaml doesn't have the "shiny new" feeling of Rust (also suffers from other issues, such as its standard library/libraries, and the tooling, and the "mlis are documentation" attitude that is fairly prevalent in the community). I'd say with more polish and a lot of marketing, it could easily gain more market share (even though some things have gotten much better since opam). Sometimes, working in OCaml feels like flying a starship equipped with XVIIIth century cannons. The awesomeness of many of its features is in stark contrast to the gaping holes of its ecosystem (no good INI parsing library in 2014? no usable pure OCaml regexp library?).

aethertap 12y ago

I've been thinking about implementing fastcgi so that I could play with simple rust webapps. Haven't had time to start on it though, so if that sounds interesting you'd have at least one immediate user.

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
Instead of FastCGI just speak HTTP. And for those there are libraries already.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Or 0MQ to talk to Mongrel2.