One of the deep-pocketed founding members of the Rust Foundation says it's easy. I'm surprised.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Wut? They're a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
While they (and everyone using Rust) will benefit off of more people using Rust, it's not like they have a vested interest to the point of spreading misinformation.
They’re a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
Fans of a programming language stating they like the programming language is hardly thought-provoking stuff. There are also apps written in brainfuck and that means nothing as well.
I'm pretty sure that's not how dyslexia works, but either way, I didn't write that. And while the title of the article suggests otherwise, the news here isn't that Google says something is easy. The news is that they published a guide to make that thing easy.
Clearly Rust is a conspiracy.
Clearly Rust is a conspiracy.
Anyone in software development who was not born yesterday is already well aware of the whole FOMO cycle:
- hey there's a shiny new tool,
- it's so fantastic only morons don't use it,
- oh god what a huge mistake I did,
- hey, there's a shiny new tool,
I assume that you do know that tools improve objectively in the cycle and are making a joke on purpose.
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The ruinous powers are plotting once more
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Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust
That seems like a poor attitude imo.
A valid point tho. Generally it is difficult to ask everybody to learn a new language.
I mean, I work as a software engineering and if I'm not doing continuing ed, be it about architecture, storage, or new languages, I'm going to be of less value in the marketplace. I've learnt languages I didn't particularly want to in the past for work (though I generally came to tolerate or even like some of them. Not lua, though; lua can go to hell).
If Rust truly is the better, safer option, then these people are holding everything back.
"learn Rust" in this case is learn it to a level where all of the little behaviour around cross language integrations are understood and security flaws won't be introduced. Expert level.
It's not "I did a pet project over the weekend".
You are correct and I am aware of that. However, it also seems that they both refuse to learn it and refuse to work with people at that expert level based on the recent drama, which seems very much like holding things back to me.
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C/C++ is the bedrock of our modern civilization in some ways more fundamental than actual bedrock, the first step in getting any OS running is making it run C and after that you are basically done, it’s not surprising that developers resist, if nothing else it’s a common language, and standards are hard to change on the best of days. This isn’t just learning a language, it’s a complete paradigm shift.
The bedrock of modern civilizations is expensive to develop, buggy and unergonomic though.
If you make C run, you probably (I'm not sure, would have to verify) can make rust run. And if there isn't yet, there will probably soon be a C compiler written in rust, so you can choose to bootstrap from wherever you prefer.
C's ABI will probably last longer than C, since there is not a stable rust ABI though.
You cannot, today, build a Rust compiler directly from C, but you're right that people are working on it. See this recent post: https://notgull.net/announcing-dozer/
Edit: you can certainly bootstrap Rust from C via C++, as the article covers. I misinterpreted the comment above.
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It's not a question of what's the better option. In reality we have a lot of software that already exists and works, and you can't replace it all in bulk at the same time. So the question is whether the implementation of Rust makes logistical sense, given the difficulties of maintaining currently existing software while replacing some parts of it.
Fortunately, they aren’t being asked to do that. All the rust team was requesting was metadata about the call signatures so that they could have a grasp on expected behavior.
It would be a valid point if he weren't literally speaking over the people trying to tell him that they're not demanding he learn Rust: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548
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Oh jeeze, you have no idea. You can watch it yourself: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548
That timestamp is about where the audience member (a maintainer of ext4 and related utilities) starts speaking. The "here's the thing" quote is around 28:40.
Wow what an absolute dick
I mean aren't they forcing everyone else to learn C/C++ otherwise? If we follow that logic, at least
I guess you can argue it's already written in C. So that was always a requirement.
That way we'll just find maintainers went near extinct over time, just like COBOL developers that are as rare as they are expensive. Only Linux kernel isn't a bank, and maybe will not have as much money to pay to rare developers capable of maintaining C codebase
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2024: Google says replacing C/C++ with Rust is easy
2025: Google buys Rust
2026: Google shuts down Rust
2028: Rust 2
They need to tell that to Theodore Ts’o.
Rust is one of those things that every time I look into it, I don't really follow what makes it so good. What's a good starter project to learn the language and get a sense of what makes it worthwhile over the established stuff?
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If your alternative is C++ then it removes the enormous burden of manually tracking lifetimes and doing manual memory management. C++ does have RAII which helps with that enormously but even then there are a gazillion footguns that Rust just doesn't have - especially with the newer stuff like rvalue references, std::move, coroutines etc. It also saves you from C++'s dreaded undefined behaviour which is everywhere.
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It has a very strong (and nicely designed) type system which gives an "if it compiles it works" kind of feel, similar to FP languages like Haskell (so they say anyway; I've not used it enough to know). The borrow checker strongly pushes you to write code in a style that somehow leads to less buggy code. More compiler errors, but much less debugging and fixing bugs.
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The libraries and APIs are generally very well designed and nice to use. If you've ever used Dart or Go think how nice the standard library is compared to JavaScript or PHP. It took C++ like 2 decades to get
string::starts_withbut Rust started with it (and much more!). -
Fast by default.
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Modern tooling. No project setup hassle.
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It's a value based language, not reference based. References are explicit unlike JavaScript, Java, C#, etc. This is much nicer and makes things like e.g. copying values a lot easier. JavaScript's answer for ages was "serialise to JSON and back" which is crazy.
Downsides:
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Slow compilation sometimes. I'd say it's on par with C++ these days.
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Async Rust is kind of a mess. They shipped an MVP and it's still kind of hard to use and has unexpected footguns, which is a shame because sync Rust avoids footguns so well. Avoid async Rust if you can. Unfortunately sometimes you can't.
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Interop with C++ is somewhat painful because Rust doesn't have move constructors.
Great language overall. Probably the best at the moment.
I disagree with 5.
I am an electronics engineer, so admittedly only ever worked with C and Python scripting (and not a programmer by any means) but I literally stopped learning rust for embedded because every single tooling setup step was wrong or failed for both chips I was testing out (NRF chip and an esp32-C3). Maybe only embedded rust was still a mess tooling-wise, but I have no use case for learning userspace rust first. It would just be a waste of my limited free time 😅
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I would add to the downside that it's not the best programming language for game development, etc. There was some blog post about how troublesome is it to develop games using Rust due to some of the features that are good in other areas, like the whole concept of "immutable by default".
I can also recommend D, if you want to deal with different issues, like the D Language Foundation fearing of change due to not wanting to deal with division from a new and incompatible version yet again, the GC being both a blessing and curse, if you want to go without a (tracing) GC you'll need to go with a custom runtime that potentially missing many of its features, the attribute hell, etc.
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If the target for the firmware has stdlib already implemented, my experience has been that it is indeed easy with minimal experience in the language.
Mixing "firmware" with "easy with minimal experience" in the same sentence makes me cringe...
That's fair. To be clear, I meant minimal experience with the Rust programming language. I've mainly tinkered with ESP32 types of MCUs in Arduino and CircuitPython when it comes to firmware, but have much more software experience. In some ways, I found the little bit of Rust that I tried easier because of the tooling - defaulting to a CLI tool to flash rather than an IDE is much more comfortable for me.
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