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Rust is just a tool

Rust is just a tool

JuniperMesos

Comments (104)

  • zamalek
    Rust happens to be an extremely good tool. There are definitely situations where it absolutely sucks. e.g. Zed is a heroic effort, but look at the code and you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs.We may disagree on the premise that humans are generally incapable of correct and safe manual memory management, but that's a degree of distrust I hold for myself. You may have never written a memory bug in your life, but I have, and that renders me completely incompetent.If a project in an unsafe language has ever had a memory bug (I'm looking at you, Bun), the maintainers objectively have a track record of not being capable of manual memory management. You wouldn't put a person who has a track record of crashing busses at the wheel of a school bus.And Rust isn't the only memory-safe language. You can turn to Java, Go, C#, Type/JavaScript, and whole bunch of others. Rust just so happens to have ocaml tendencies and other things that make it a joy to read and write, so that's definitely preference on my part. One of these days I'll learn ocaml and possibly drop Rust :)
  • anon-3988
    Rust is just a tool. A decent tool that I think can be made better (by removing stuff and stop adding more stuff to the surface syntax). So I am down to criticize Rust.However, I also don't understand how people don't see the usefulness of what Rust put to the mainstream: algebraic data types, sum types, traits, etc.I also get super annoyed when people think Rust is only chosen for "safety". Says frustrating things like "so I can just use unsafe", because no you don't and if you do I would reject your changes immediately.Honestly, in general, I am just annoyed when people don't use the right tool for the right job. And attempts to fix the tool with more bespoke stuff on top it.
  • maxbond
    1000x yes. Rust is not a One True Language, there exists no One True Language. Rust made some improvements over previous languages (many of which were ported over from previous languages that demonstrated the value but weren't break out successes) and serendipitously those improvements added up to something that was really significant and unlocked interesting and useful capabilities. I'm never going back to how my workflows were before I learned Rust (though I still write in other languages everyday).But there will be other languages in the future that will continue to deliver small improvements until one day they result in another phase change. The honeymoon with Rust will be over and it will start feeling more antiquated.C, Python, Java, are just a couple random languages that were/are similarly influential. (C is of course orders of magnitude more influential, the only language more influential is probably COBOL?)
  • dcminter
    While these are all reasonable points, there is a distinction between criticising people for using ${lang} (bad) and criticising the language (neutral).Some people get their egoes attached to their choices (for or against Rust).Also there's a time and a place for all criticism. If the conversation is not fundamentally about language choice then it's very irritating to have it brought up.
  • fmajid
    Overly enthusiastic Rust evangelists can be annoying, but nowhere as much as C++ or C advocates defensively claiming memory safety isn't a big deal, and they are going to have it in the next version of the language anyway.I find my experience with Erlang has helped with the (considerable) learning curve for Rust, but I still prefer Go for most use-cases.
  • furryrain
    > like every popular crate buy into their marketing hype > follow community "best practices"Yea, I get smug judgement from Rust zealots for not picking the in vogue crates.I get a lot of help too though.People are passionate about it. That has good and bad outcomes.
  • xlii
    I agree with this (short and sweet) piece. I'm Rust user but the crab-hype turned me off for the long time.Personally I'd prefer writing Haskell but there are sharp edges I can't overlook (like constantly breaking LSP of 11/10 difficulty on producing distributable binaries).I cringe every time I spit out 50 lines of boilerplate just to get C done Rust, but it's best tool I found that's good enough in many scopes.
  • randomint64
    Sherlock Holmes liked to say "When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".The same is true for programming languages. When you have eliminated all the others for their fatal flaws, only Rust remains, so it's not "just a tool", it's the best tool (or less worse, depending on how you like the syntax).You can read more about the technical reasons here: https://kerkour.com/rust-software-engineering-reliability
  • goku12
    I'm curious about the exact exchange that prompted the author to say this.> refuse to admit there are alternatives to RAIII'm even more curious about this. Can the author or anybody else explain what this means specifically? Can anybody list those alternatives other than GC and RC?PS: Computer Science isn't exactly my primary professional competence.
  • alecco
    Rust is an amazing tool that sadly has the most toxic self-righteous community in PL. Like doxxing that kid for daring to post he refactored his pet project from Rust to Go.
  • kshri24
    My only gripe with Rust is Rust-Analyzer taking up so much of my system's resources. And I know it is not really fixable which is a bummer.
  • ysleepy
    Rust does not have the best tooling by far imo.The IDE capabilities are not nearly as advanced as they are for Java for example.Compared to C/C++ or dynamically typed languages, sure.I love that cargo unifies the ecosystem, no quabble over one shitty build tool over another.I feel like the IDE story still has a long way to go.
  • qsera
    Rust is boaring! I ll never use Rust for something I build for fun.It will be a shame if new programmers will stay away from C because of all the scaremongering regarding the consequences of not freeing some memory (in some toy, pet project) in their own computers.
  • josephg
    > Programming Rust does not mean I have to: buy into their marketing hype> give the same smug lectures about "safety"I'm often confused reading articles like this, which take for granted the existence of some "rust evangelism strike force" which goes after people on the internet for not liking rust enough.The way people talk, it sounds like there's some insanely effective marketing campaign going on to promote rust everywhere. But I haven't seen it. Certainly not any more than any other technology people get excited about for awhile, like Go. Or docker when that launched.Where are these comments? Can anyone give some actual links to these sort of comments people say online, which don't get immediately downvoted? The way people talk, these comments must be made in such large volumes that it seems very odd I don't notice them?
  • lispisok
    Rust is cool but there is way too much dogma around its memory safety and static typing in general being a panacea. Most errors are not type errors. Two days after Cloudfare's little Rust hiccup that took the internet down for a day I saw people posting about Rust "if it compiles it runs".
  • shrubble
    I’m glad that Rust users are willing to accept that other approaches to safety like Ada are also interesting or effective.In the past I had the impression that some thought that Rust was the first programming language to ever have the concept.
  • pjmlp
    All technology is just a tool, unfortunately it turns into religion like behaviours, because it defines with whom we work, what projects we can work on, what CVs get through HR and which ones don't,....
  • burakemir
    A programming language is a medium to communicate programs to something that can execute them. That isn't exactly the same thing as a tool. A tool in my book is a metaphor for a program that helps achieve some well-defined task. Even if we ignore this difference, we would still want to talk about tool safety.In my experience there is a C++ mob that hates Rust. These are the people who declare statement of facts as ideology. No good faith dialogue is possible.There are also competent C++ programmers who misunderstand or don't know how static checking works.I also witness normal people who are completely surprised by a statement like "C++ is all unsafe" and find that too strong. Using the word "safe" with a technical meaning throws normal people off because, sadly, not everyone who writes code is an academic PL researcher."Safe", in Rust and much PL research, means "statically checked by the compiler to be free of UB". If you are pedantic, you need to add "... under the assumption that the programmer checked all conditions for the code that is marked `unsafe`" for Rust. That is all there is to it. Scientific definition.C++ in its current form is full of gross design mistakes, many of which could be corrected at the price of breaking backwards compatibility. Mistakes happen, aldo to world leading PL researcher (the ML language and polymorphic references) which is why the field embraced mechanically checked proofs. The difference is the willingness to address mistakes.Academics use "safe" in exactly the meaning the Rust community uses. If you don't understand this, go and educate yourself. Academics need to communicate effectively which leads to technical meanings for everyday words or made up words and jargon.Maybe a statically checked safe low-level language is marketing genius. It is also a technical breakthrough building on decades of academic research, and took a lot of effort.Bjarne and friends chose a different direction. Safety was not a design goal originally but doubling down on this direction means that C++ is not going to improve. These are all facts.Backwards compatibility is a constraint. Constraints don't give anyone license to stop people who don't have those constraints.We don't have to feel any moral obligation to use statically checked languages for programs. But claiming that static checking does not make a difference is ignorant, and attaching value to one's ignorance certainly seems like an indicator for ideology and delusion.
  • michaelmure
    Any recommandation for a quality non-toy rust codebase to study?
  • oytis
    We need more courageous people like him.
  • rvz
    It's just a tool. But to some people, Rust is more like a religion than a tool and they let it define them to the point even the language maintainers disavow them.At any point, if you provide any conterpoints or fair criticism towards the language objectively, just expect lots of fans to remind you that it is the best programming language ever created and yours is "unsafe" by default.
  • BoingBoomTschak
    "$LANG is just a tool" has never been right. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (or the blub lang analogy - and not the smug part - for programmers) is still true to this day.tl;dr: Just a tool, but "we shape our tools and then our tools shape us".
  • zenon_paradox
    [dead]
  • WhereIsTheTruth
    [flagged]
  • phplovesong
    Rust has nothing new (even the lifetime stuff is copied) really. It just marketed itself really well. It got a huge number of migrants from JS/TS ecosystem, and python, and some from the C(+*) ecosystems.Its a good language dont get me wrong, but also a huge pita to work with.
  • up2isomorphism
    Rust is a very very ugly language, this is made worse when it is shamelessly promoted by bunch of persistent people with bad tastes.Also trying to fight runtime behavior with compile time constraints cannot be a universal treatment. Trying to enforce OOP is one of such examples, and it already failed .