this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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is Rust really that powerful / intuitive? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello all,

I am a data center engineer of about 8 years now. I've spent the last 3 years or so slowly learning Python(I say slowly not because of my effort, but because learning Python was actually very difficult for me.) I am not an expert in any way shape or form, I understand the concepts of OOP, inheritance, classes, functions, methods, etc and I have found that the python documentation that can be found within the language is usually enough for me to be able to write the programs that I want to write. Very rarely have I had to write programs that have to bypass the GIL, but occasionally, I have created threadpools for applications that are not I/O intensive. What I'm saying is, for most things that I create, performance is enough with Python.

However, I have been inspired by how much love Rust is getting from the people who use Rust. I have tried to find some books for using Rust for network automation and unfortunately I have not been able to find any reputable books.

Most of the "automation" work that I do involves parsing data with regex, restructuring the data, converting the data into a modeled format and transforming something with that data. Does anyone have any common use cases for Rust that might interest me? Has anyone used Rust for network automation tools? With familiarity, can Rust's intuitiveness match Python's "from idea to deployment" speed? Or should I only learn Rust if I intend to create applications that need tight performance?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

I don't think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on "idea to deployment" speed. Python's downsides:

  • Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don't have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
  • Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They're not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

Rust is good when you need at least one of:

  • High speed
  • Control over use of memory
  • Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
  • Can't cope with a Garbage Collector
  • Compiling to a microcontroller

If you're doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it's just a single binary.

One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it's designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level "direct control of memory" language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don't have to "fight the borrow checker" - it'll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn't know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there's a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn't work, or it has a security hole because it's possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.

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