Rust 1.27 Released With SIMD Improvements

[brrrrttttt]

Momentum-wise, Rust is doing perfectly well I think. No-one says it's for everyone or that it's the silver bullet that solves all programming problems. If it doesn't give you benefits, you are not alone. If C/C++/Go works well for you, you have no reason to switch. Similarly, those who embraced Rust and make great stuff with it are not alone either.

Full ack.

But I think you are wrong in assuming that Rust can only prevent "a small subset of bugs"; in fact, memory errors, buffer overflows and race conditions are endemic in C/C++ and even in Go.

Excepting race conditions, I've never been bitten by any of the others (in my own code), and Rust is certainly no silver bullet for race conditions. YMMV I guess.

It is also possible to write a memory-safe program in C++, but it's next to impossible to *prove* that it is memory safe. In Rust, the compiler does it for you for free.

Modern C++ is also able to do a pretty good job of this.

I agree with jacob here, but would add one additional thing: it's not because today you are writing something in C/C++/Go, that tomorrow you won't have something that would be a better fit for Rust!

Not disagreeing with that, just saying one needs to invest a certain amount of time to become productive in a new language + ecosystem (libraries are at least as important as the language itself in this regard). Unless you can spend enough time working with <new language here>, it's simply more productive to stick with something you know.

[Falcon1]

Excepting race conditions, I've never been bitten by any of the others (in my own code), and Rust is certainly no silver bullet for race conditions. YMMV I guess.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html?highlight=borrow#references-and-borrowing

Rust uses an ownership model which prevents dataraces. That's why parallelism in rust is more easy to do. No worries about races.

[cl333r]

Rust uses an ownership model which prevents dataraces. That's why parallelism in rust is more easy to do. No worries about races.

It goes both ways - this very ownership model makes ordinary code much more difficult to write and anywhere you have parent-child relationship you have to use a special library because the ownership model has this flaw that it's impossible to express parent-child relationships. Add lifecycle annotations and you get a Rust code that is a lot harder to write and interpret. That's why I switched back to C++. Rust will never be as productive as C++.

A disharmonic personality. Reading any amount of Rust code evokes the joke "friends don't let friends skip leg day" and the comic imagery (https://www.google.com/search?q=...) of men with hulky torsos resting on skinny legs.
Rust puts safe, precise memory management front and center of everything. Unfortunately, that's seldom the problem domain, which means a large fraction of the thinking and coding are dedicated to essentially a clerical job (which GC languages actually automate out of sight). Safe, deterministic memory reclamation is a hard problem, but is not the only problem or even the most important problem in a program. Therefore Rust ends up expending a disproportionately large language design real estate on this one matter. It will be interesting to see how Rust starts bulking up other aspects of the language; the only solution is to grow the language, but then the question remains whether abstraction can help the pesky necessity to deal with resources at all levels.

From:
https://www.quora.com/Which-language...i-Alexandrescu

[Weasel]

But I think you are wrong in assuming that Rust can only prevent "a small subset of bugs"; in fact, memory errors, buffer overflows and race conditions are endemic in C/C++ and even in Go.

It's not the fault of C/C++ whatsoever. It's a programmer problem. Maybe those "programmers" need to get good and rely more on critical thinking than memorizing shit they read off stackoverflow by rote.

[Vistaus]

Ah, the Holy Grail of programming languages has a new release, yay!

[Vistaus]

Not disagreeing with that, just saying one needs to invest a certain amount of time to become productive in a new language + ecosystem (libraries are at least as important as the language itself in this regard). Unless you can spend enough time working with <new language here>, it's simply more productive to stick with something you know.

People keep throwing that argument under various conditions. For example, "Windows will not lose any market share because people don't want to learn new stuff", yet macOS has way more market share than it did 10 years ago. So why are people learning the "new" macOS paradigm if they don't want to learn it? Or what about Windows Phone? Yes, lack of apps didn't help much, but there were quite a lot of people who said "no, I want to buy an Android phone because of the UI, not because Windows Phone lacks apps" yet they kept on using Windows on desktop. So they intentionally chose to learn Android despite the fact that Windows Phone would've had next to no learning curve for them.
And the same could be said for programming languages, so that means you're wrong and that Rust *will* catch on because people want to learn new stuff after all.

[Weasel]

People keep throwing that argument under various conditions. For example, "Windows will not lose any market share because people don't want to learn new stuff", yet macOS has way more market share than it did 10 years ago. So why are people learning the "new" macOS paradigm if they don't want to learn it? Or what about Windows Phone? Yes, lack of apps didn't help much, but there were quite a lot of people who said "no, I want to buy an Android phone because of the UI, not because Windows Phone lacks apps" yet they kept on using Windows on desktop. So they intentionally chose to learn Android despite the fact that Windows Phone would've had next to no learning curve for them.
And the same could be said for programming languages, so that means you're wrong and that Rust *will* catch on because people want to learn new stuff after all.

Nah, it's because Windows 8 and 10 suck precisely because they are "mobile first" designed (especially 8).

[Vistaus]

Nah, it's because Windows 8 and 10 suck precisely because they are "mobile first" designed (especially 8).

That was not my point...

[Weasel]

That was not my point...

People generally don't like change. As you said, they "don't want to learn new stuff". You tried to refute it, but you misunderstood why it happens, hence my post.

Windows 8 and 10 changed windows radically. Why would a small amount of people not go to macOS etc then?

Here an imaginary guy who went to macOS: "fuck Windows 10, I didn't like to learn new stuff on mac but at this point it doesn't matter anymore since W10 is horrible"


So unless C++ becomes shit with the next standard (radical change or something), the argument doesn't really apply, IMO.

[Vistaus]

People generally don't like change. As you said, they "don't want to learn new stuff". You tried to refute it, but you misunderstood why it happens, hence my post.

Windows 8 and 10 changed windows radically. Why would a small amount of people not go to macOS etc then?

Here an imaginary guy who went to macOS: "fuck Windows 10, I didn't like to learn new stuff on mac but at this point it doesn't matter anymore since W10 is horrible"


So unless C++ becomes shit with the next standard (radical change or something), the argument doesn't really apply, IMO.

But my point about the Windows Phone interface still stands. Like I said: there were many people who didn't mind the app gap on Windows Phone, but chose Android anyway despite the fact that Windows Phone used the same interface as they were used to on the desktop. So they intentionally chose to learn a whole new UI (Android).

Also, iPads are very popular among Windows users as well. Why? I mean: iOS is nothing like Windows. So they also choose to learn a new UI there.