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by jchw
2315 days ago
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I don’t know how long it takes to fully get past stumbling through borrow checking and learning the intricacies of Result but it’s long enough to be a detriment. Obviously learning curve on its own is a downside, but also this complexity does not disappear when you understand it. It’s similar to, but less severe than, C++, in this regard. I also think it depends heavily on the type of program you are writing and how. I’ve certainly hit cases where I still don’t know the optimal way of structuring things. In other cases people have managed to help me figure out what I need to do. Concurrent memory safety is a huge plus, without a doubt, though there are applications where its not enough and applications where its too much. I think that puts Rust in a spot where it has use cases where it is clearly the best option but many use cases where it is overkill. As an example, Go shines particularly well for servers thanks to Goroutines and the fact that many servers have a shared-nothing architecture these days. |
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That's right, but no one expect to learn quantum physics in a few weeks either. Rust is indeed way longer to learn than Python, Javascript & others, but it's also much more powerful. And with the same level of power, both C and C++ are way harder to master than Rust (and arguably, nobody really master them in practice since even the most brilliant programmers shoot themselves in the foot from time to time. Yes, even DJB [1].
> Rust in a spot where it has use cases where it is clearly the best option but many use cases where it is overkill.
Indeed. It would make no sense to switch to Rust if Python is good enough for the task. I was just arguing that once you've learned Rust, you can do pretty much anything you want with it without friction, and I personally wouldn't bother writing anything in Python nowadays, because I can write Rust as fast and get the static typing guarantees and sane error handling that comes with it.
> Go shines particularly well for servers thanks to Goroutines and the fact that many servers have a shared-nothing architecture these days.
Having done quite a bit of Go, I don't agree with you. It's way too easy to accidentally share data between goroutines, and then cause data race or deadlocks . The day they introduced the race detector, we found 6 data races in our code (a few thousand loc) and a few others in our dependencies, and in the next year we found two not caught by the race detector (because it's a dynamic thing, it can't catch all races). More than generics (which are being introduced if they don't change their mind like they did for error handling) Go really need something akin to Send and Sync in Rust. M,.or maybe like Pony's capabilities system, but Go definitely needs improvement on that front. Multithreading is a hard thing, and Go makes it too easy to use, to people without the necessary experience (because Go is so easy it attracts a lot of junior or self-taught devs) without safety net and this generally doesn't end well.
[1]: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/16058/D.j.bernstein-Djbdn...