3 ms·

Some serious voodoo science is going on here, with a good chance to become a next fad. Programming is difficult as it is, but apparently not difficult enough fo

Some serious voodoo science is going on here, with a good chance to become a next fad. Programming is difficult as it is, but apparently not difficult enough for someone's taste.

andolanra 12y ago
This 'ownership' system is a pattern which is used informally in C, C++, and other languages with manual garbage collection—the idea that you have a bit of your program responsible for allocating and freeing memory, and another bit which merely uses it. Rust takes this pattern and has the compiler enforce it. I suppose in some ways it makes programming more difficult, but it's also going to make low-level programming safer by virtue of the fact that certain invalid programs are no longer possible to express. Rust is one of very few languages which can offer that. (Also, having used Rust a fair amount, I don't think it's actually that difficult once you're used to it. I can think of much more complicated programming features that have been present in popular languages for decades!)
- rubiquity 12y ago
  For me, understanding Rust's type system has been far more complicated than understanding the ownership model. But that's likely because I have zero C, C++ or Haskell experience.
  - andolanra 12y ago
    Has it been something about the type system in particular, or just keeping track of all the parts? I would not call it a simple language, but I think it's ultimately tractable, albeit with work.
moonchrome 12y ago
These problems already exist with low level programming (ie. no GC), Rust just forces you to deal with it explicitly at compile time trough it's type system rather than implicitly (docs/conventions/correct library usage). Anyone who's dealt with manual memory management already knows about these problems and rust solutions shouldn't be that foreign. My biggest issue with rust is that it's still in early phases even considering the 1.0 release, the language is still not really that expressive and plenty of stuff still looks incredibly tedious to do. I think 1.0 release is "here's something you can use" but it's not "here's something you'd want to use". I think I will need to wait till 2.0 so things get polished out and early adopters find all the initial design problems.
- iopq 12y ago
  Recall that in semantic versions you can ADD really nice sugar in a 1.1 version that will make life easier. I think Some 1.x release this year will make the language much more approachable. Especially regarding closures, they are really painful to use because nothing is properly inferred. You can easily improve type inference by just improving the compiler, this is almost not even a language issue. But it's a real quality of life issue. So after 1.0 is out you will see a lot of RFCs for things like variadic generics, higher kinded types, etc. that will make someone's life easier (and remove really ugly hacks due to the lack of said things) but are completely backwards compatible.
  - moonchrome 12y ago
    Fair enough, I guess I should have said next big release. I really want a language that can replace C++ but ATM Rust doesn't feel like it would be more productive for the things I want to do as a language and then there's the tooling/libraries/platforms.

Some serious voodoo science is going on here, with a good chance to become a next fad. Programming is difficult as it is, but apparently not difficult enough for someone's taste.

andolanra 12y ago

This 'ownership' system is a pattern which is used informally in C, C++, and other languages with manual garbage collection—the idea that you have a bit of your program responsible for allocating and freeing memory, and another bit which merely uses it. Rust takes this pattern and has the compiler enforce it. I suppose in some ways it makes programming more difficult, but it's also going to make low-level programming safer by virtue of the fact that certain invalid programs are no longer possible to express. Rust is one of very few languages which can offer that. (Also, having used Rust a fair amount, I don't think it's actually that difficult once you're used to it. I can think of much more complicated programming features that have been present in popular languages for decades!)

rubiquity 12y ago
For me, understanding Rust's type system has been far more complicated than understanding the ownership model. But that's likely because I have zero C, C++ or Haskell experience.
- andolanra 12y ago
  Has it been something about the type system in particular, or just keeping track of all the parts? I would not call it a simple language, but I think it's ultimately tractable, albeit with work.

moonchrome 12y ago

These problems already exist with low level programming (ie. no GC), Rust just forces you to deal with it explicitly at compile time trough it's type system rather than implicitly (docs/conventions/correct library usage). Anyone who's dealt with manual memory management already knows about these problems and rust solutions shouldn't be that foreign. My biggest issue with rust is that it's still in early phases even considering the 1.0 release, the language is still not really that expressive and plenty of stuff still looks incredibly tedious to do. I think 1.0 release is "here's something you can use" but it's not "here's something you'd want to use". I think I will need to wait till 2.0 so things get polished out and early adopters find all the initial design problems.

iopq 12y ago
Recall that in semantic versions you can ADD really nice sugar in a 1.1 version that will make life easier. I think Some 1.x release this year will make the language much more approachable. Especially regarding closures, they are really painful to use because nothing is properly inferred. You can easily improve type inference by just improving the compiler, this is almost not even a language issue. But it's a real quality of life issue. So after 1.0 is out you will see a lot of RFCs for things like variadic generics, higher kinded types, etc. that will make someone's life easier (and remove really ugly hacks due to the lack of said things) but are completely backwards compatible.
- moonchrome 12y ago
  Fair enough, I guess I should have said next big release. I really want a language that can replace C++ but ATM Rust doesn't feel like it would be more productive for the things I want to do as a language and then there's the tooling/libraries/platforms.