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| ▲ | LexiMax 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Great, if you are right everyone is going to be using Rust eventually. Every task does not need speed and safety. Therefore, "everyone" doesn't need Rust. But I could easily see a future where C++ is relegated to legacy language status. It has already had decades of garbage-collected languages chipping away at most of its general-purpose uses, but Rust seems capable and in a position to take away most of its remaining niches. It's kind of why the old C++ programmer that I am decided to learn Rust in the first place - seemed like a good idea at the time to skate where the puck is heading. | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I like the concepts proposed by Rust but do not like fighting with the borrow checker or sprinkling code with box, ref, cell, rc, refcell, etc. I'm not sure why this would be confusing or disliked by a C++ dev. Rust's Box<T> is similar to C++'s std::unique_ptr<T>. Rust's Rc<T>, Arc<T>, and Rc<RefCell<T>> serve similar uses to C++'s std::shared_ptr<T>. Rust's Weak<T> is similar to C++'s std::weak_ptr<T>. Verbosity of both is nearly identical. The big difference is that Rust enforces the rules around aliasing and mutability at compile time, whereas with C++ I get to find out I've made a mistake when my running code crashes. |
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| ▲ | LexiMax 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As a C++ developer, my experience with learning both Rust and Zig is that they're both good languages, and any reasonably skilled C++ developer could learn either language if they put their mind to it. If you forced me to pick between Zig and Rust for a long-running project though, I'd pick Rust 10/10 times for the simple fact that it has been stable for more than a decade and already has momentum and funding behind it. Zig is a cool language - one that I've actually written more of than Rust - but it hasn't hit 1.0 yet and still has significant churn in both the language and standard library. | | |
| ▲ | wewewedxfgdf 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is this: Rust is complex. That is not a statement anyone can deny. Unless you're a Rust-bro "hey man I learned it so I’m baffled how you can't see it's super simple ..... etc etc" - often the implication that you're not very smart if you think Rust is complex. Of everything that I have learned about programming, this is the BIGGEST lesson: - complexity is bad, avoid complexity. Complex is not the same as "sophisticated", which implies necessary intricacy. Complex means unneeded unnecessary cognitive load - things made harder than they should be when it could have been avoided - that's complexity. If you are writing complex code then you're writing bad code. And Rust is complex. It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem. What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine. | | |
| ▲ | LexiMax 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem. I am not a savant by any means, and yet I was able to get up and running with Rust relatively quickly. What Rust isn't is ergonomic, in that Rust gets very annoyed with the ways that one might want to structure their code. Trust me, I got bit by the borrow checker countless times, and it did grate on me. As a result, there are many tasks that I would avoid using Rust for, tasks where both speed and safety aren't critical. But if neither is a priority, the list of alternative languages I can resort to is quite long, much longer than Zig, C++, or C. And in the cases where both are a factor, I would consider being needled by the compiler to be a feature and not a bug. | |
| ▲ | afdbcreid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You'd be surprised to see, after deep inspection, how little of Rust you can remove while keeping its safety story the same (that is, memory safe without GC). Traits? Nope. We need some way for code reuse. Classes cannot be made memory safe without extra cost (at least, I don't know how can they). And they are not less complex either. Templates like C++? More complex, and doesn't allow defining safety interfaces. No tool for code reuse? That will also severely limit the safety (imagine how safe Rust was if everyone would need to roll their `Vec`). The borrow checker of course cannot be omitted. ADTs are really required for almost anything Rust does (and also, fantastic on their own). Destructors? Required to prevent use after free. Async can be removed (and in fact, wasn't there in the beginning) which is a large surface area, but even today it can mostly be avoided if you're not working in some areas. I don't think anybody can deny Rust is complex, but most often it's inherent complexity (what you call "sophistication") given the constraints Rust operates in, not accidental complexity. | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely this. Folks are used to an awful lot of the complexity being hidden from them through avoidance of threading, runtimes, garbage checkers, standard libraries, and so on. For a language which exposes all of the complexity, Rust feels minimalist. C++ is one of a small number of other languages which also expose all the complexity, and it feels gargantuan and like poorly-thought out additions after additions by comparison. I don't mean to disparage the C++ devs at all, C++ has managed to be useful for ~40 years, and it's still capable of incredible things. Just that we've learned a lot over those 40 years, and computational capacity has grown significantly, and Rust has had the opportunity and architecture to integrate some of that learning more fundamentally. Somehow most of the libraries in the Rust ecosystem seem to interoperate with each other seamlessly, and use the same build system, which I didn't have to learn another unrelated language to use! Astounding! |
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| ▲ | aw1621107 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem. We did, arguably. Those languages are called JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, etc. Those languages tend to be eschewed in certain niches, though, and it's there that simplicity tends to be harder to achieve. > What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine. I think it might also be worth considering that some people find those "non-safety related extras" a good thing. Dropping backwards compatibility and/or familiarity, just like everything else, is a tradeoff, and that tradeoff might be worth it if you think the resulting semantics are nicer to work with. | |
| ▲ | adamnemecek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Rust is complex. Compared with what? C++? It is not. | | |
| ▲ | wewewedxfgdf 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | False equivalence. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You focused on the C++ aspect and completely failed to engage with the actual critique - what is a “simple” language that you’re evaluating Rust against as a failure? |
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| ▲ | aw1621107 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The real answer should have been a new language that has memory safety without all the extra conceptual changes and orthogonal subsystems that Rust brings. The core value of safety did not need the reinvention of everything else with the accompanying complexity and cognitive load. What would the minimal set of features be, in your opinion? > For example Zig which instead of introducing a new metaprogramkming language, it uses...... Zig - imagine using the same language instead of inventing a new additional language with all the accompanying complexity and cognitive load and problems. Zig probably isn't the best comparison since Zig doesn't try to achieve the same level of compile-time memory safety guarantees that Rust aims for. For instance, Zig doesn't try to statically prevent use-after-frees or data races. That being said, as with everything it's a question of tradeoffs. Zig's metaprogramming approach is certainly interesting, but from what I understand it doesn't offer the same set of features as Rust's approach. For example: - Zig's generics are more similar to C++ templates in that only instantiated functions are fully checked by the compiler. Rust's generics, on the other hand, are completely checked at the definition site so if the definition type-checks the author knows it will type-check for all possible instantiations. Rust's approach also lends itself to nicer error messages since everything a generic needs is visible up front. - Zig's comptime isn't quite 1:1 with Rust's macros. comptime is for... well, compile-time computation (e.g., reflection, compile-time branching, or instantiating types). Macros are for manipulating syntax (e.g., code generation or adding inline support for other languages). Each has things the other can't do, though to be fair there is overlap in problems they can be used to solve. In any case, metaprogramming approaches are (mostly?) independent of memory safety. > And result and option and move by dedfault - none of these things were needed but they all add up to more complexity and unfamiliarity and cognitive load. I don't think Result/Option are that complex (if at all) since they're trivially derivable from discriminated unions/sum types/enums. I'm also not sure how move by default is necessarily "more complexity... and cognitive load"? Maybe as a result of unfamiliarity, perhaps, but that seems more a property of a person than a language, no? | | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The real answer should have been a new language that has memory safety without all the extra conceptual changes and orthogonal subsystems that Rust brings. So what you're saying here is that you don't understand that Rust's rules around memory ownership, aliasing, and mutability are what allow the language to provide deterministic compile time memory safety without runtime cost. If you figure out another way to guarantee memory safety at compile time with zero runtime overhead, you should write a paper and start another language around it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Hardware_Enhanced_R... exists, and is an exciting, laudable effort, I think. But requires hardware support as well as language modifications. |
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