[durandal1]

After four months, only 50% of the developers though they were as productive in Rust as other language. Given that the respondents are arguably a very capable group of engineers, this doesn't seem that great for any company looking to adopt Rust.

[saulrh]

Consider an alternative reading:

50% of developers think they are as productive in a language they have four months of practice with as they are in a language they have fourteen years of practice with.

50% of developers think they are as productive in a high-performance bit-bashing-capable language as they are in a high-level glue language.

The people in this statistic are switching from languages they have years or sometimes decades of productivity in, and they're switching from languages like python and go and java. I see a lot of programmers who do similar switches never reaching productivity parity with C or C++. 50% of devs getting there in 4 months is amazing.

[PartiallyTyped]

I am willing to bet that the type system and the opinionated way of doing things helps a lot here.

Anecdata but I found myself very productive with Haskell when I was learning it for grad school, to the point where I knew that if it compiled, it was most likely right.

I had similar experiences though not to that degree with Rust with very little time spent on it in comparison to Haskell. I feel a lot more comfortable sleeping at night over C or Python.

[tasuki]

> Anecdata but I found myself very productive with Haskell when I was learning it for grad school, to the point where I knew that if it compiled, it was most likely right.

I recently told this to someone. The very next day my Elm code compiled just fine but it had three relatively tricky logical bugs which took me two hours to find and fix.

This was a rare enough occurrence that I remember it. Higher cosmic powers took note of my praise of strong typing and decided to teach me a lesson.

[PartiallyTyped]

Those are always fun! I am a big fan of property based testing for this reason alone!

[Fidelix]

"Anecdotally, these ramp-up numbers are in line with the time we’ve seen for developers to adopt other languages, both inside and outside of Google."

"Overall, we’ve seen no data to indicate that there is any productivity penalty for Rust relative to any other language these developers previously used at Google."

[stusmall]

At a past job we generally saw about 6 months until devs hit their stride and worked that into our hiring plans. We usually had them committing small, targeted changes within a week or two. They could usually take on tasks relatively independently in one of our simpler code bases after about 2 months. So this checks out.

Weird enough we saw more junior devs pick it up faster. They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc. It's just that when they hit their stride they are still less productive than the senior devs.

[wiz21c]

As an older dev:

> They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc.

this is really what I experiences: rust told me a thing or two about coding I never realized. And it took me pretty long to accept that :-)

[stusmall]

Big same. I remember being not being able to share a reference to something allocated on the stack at the start of main to a background thread. I was like "come on, of course its safe. That was allocated before the thread was spawned. It's main. When it returns the application exits"

But rustc's error messages helped it click that there might be a race condition on when the application returns from main and the background thread terminates. So it really needs to have the static life time to be safe. It's a small subtle thing but depending on the application it could lead to real bugs. I've definitely written variations of that bug in C before. A newer dev would have just accepted that flat out without arguing.

[shadowgovt]

I've found Rust useful to study while I'm doing my primary job in C++.

A lot of the features Rust offers regarding traits and types can be emulated in C++ with templates, but the way C++ does it is far more obfuscated. Seeing the same thing implemented in Rust helped me wrap my head around what some complicated template nestings were doing ("Oh, this is implementing traits!") in our C++ code.

[Kranar]

Four months to become as proficient in a memory safe, data race safe, and high performance language as in other languages seems like an astonishing accomplishment.

In fact it's frankly unbelievable, I'd have to imagine these guys are coming from a C++ background.

[steveklabnik]

Anecdotally, C++ developers often have a harder time coming to Rust than folks from a more scripty background. They have to unlearn things, and that can be harder than learning things.

You can see similar opinions expressed in this thread, like here, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36496654

[jsgf]

Python programmers love Rust: - Lots of compilation errors, but then the code does what it says - Fast! That gives an immediate benefit that people coming from C++ don't see.

[dureuill]

Really? Coming from C++, learning Rust felt very natural and welcome because it put a name and a structure to the mental model I had been using to keep a semblance of sanity while doing C++. Maybe learning primarily with C++11 was a factor?

[steveklabnik]

It's a broad strokes kind of thing, not a universal thing. To be honest I think it has more to do with attitudes towards the language and compiler that tend to be more prevalent in C and C++ circles.

That is, a lot of people expect that the compiler is a tool that must do what they say, not a collaborative partner. Back in the IRC days, people used to join, and be like "Rust won't let me do X. X is obviously okay. How do I get the compiler to shut up and do X?" and the reply would be something like "what if there was another thread? that's what Rust is saving you from" or "Rust's pointer rules are different than the language you're used to."

Whereas folks from scripty backgrounds don't have preconceived notions of "I should be able to do this in this way," and so tend to trust the compiler more. Heck, that's why a lot of them are learning Rust instead of C; they know the compiler can help them out, and C's compilers cannot to the same degree.

Now, that doesn't mean that scripty people don't struggle, or that C and C++ developers don't have their own advantages in learning. Just that I don't think it's straightforward to say who has the overall easier time. It's more of a "having learned something like C or C++ does not universally advantage you."

[shrimp_emoji]

Ha. Given that the C and C++ compilers optimize your code by inferring undefined behavior and other crazy stuff like that, it's funny to imagine you're not just playing with just another code generator. :p

(In fact, if you decide to be responsible about what you're telling your poor compiler to do and use a `size_t i` instead of an `int i` in your for loop, since iteration can never go negative and, if overflow happens, overflow on a signed type is worse since that's UB, I think you just made your for loop slower since all the optimizations the compiler was going to generate from inferring that iteration won't be infinite because that would overflow the `int i` and that would be UB so it can just ignore the possibility that the iteration would be infite went out the window and...man I really need to switch to Rust.)

((I've pretty painlessly learned and love Rust, btw. I'm still using C at home lately though cuz... masochism.))

[steveklabnik]

I agree with you, but many trot out the "portable assembly" line.

[dureuill]

Thanks for the elaboration. Now I'm wondering if this hasn't something to do with bottom-up people vs top-down people and their natural affinity towards lower level or higher level languages.

I'm very top-down, always starting by sketching the API I'd like to see for the feature, and then filling in the implementation. A lot of people I know from C++ are bottom-up, they toy with the implementation and then go up to the API. I found that what they like in systems programming is being close to the machine, while my interest lies in the OS boundaries and interfaces, not really the hardware.

I'm thinking maybe those different ways of approaching programming make it easier or harder to learn rust.

[steveklabnik]

I think that's possibly insightful, yeah. A similar effect: a lot of people say "Rust is bad for exploratory programming because the compiler gets in your way." For me, it's fantastic for exploratory programming specifically because when I change something, it gives me a list of the other things I need to change! That's huge! But for others, it seems to harsh their buzz. I don't know how to reconcile these opinions other than "they're opinions and different people are different."

[verdagon]

I don't think it has to be this hard to have memory safety, data race safety, and performance. After building and doing PL design in this space for a decade, I don't believe the assumption that Rust's or C++'s difficulties are inherent.

I think C++ has its own legacy difficulties (which also make transitioning to memory safety tricky), and Rust's choice of borrow checking is only one (sometimes difficult) technique for getting these aspects. But there are almost a dozen other methods out there for getting memory safety besides RC, GC, or borrow checking.

I rather think that these other approaches aren't mature enough yet to enter the mainstream, and we haven't seen them yet.

[brigadier132]

How do you build a data race safe language without taking on the restriction of immutable data (which is imo, a much worse and bigger tradeoff than the borrow checker)?

I actually really like the borrow checker as a tradeoff, I think it makes code much easier to understand and it makes all aliasing bugs impossible. The removal of aliasing bugs is I think an undersold benefit of using rust.

[verdagon]

There are a lot of ways, but I think the most promising ones involve regions. We do this a lot manually in Rust, but a language could make this a first class concept. Some examples:

* Vale combines generational references and linear types with regions to eliminate overhead.

* Verona lets you divide memory into regions which can be backed by either arena allocation or GC. I think this is promising because for most GC regions you can completely avoid the collections.

* Cone lets you put borrow checking on top of any aliasing memory strategy, so could be something like the best of all these worlds.

* No language is doing this yet, but RC plus regions to eliminate the refcounts, then adding in value types for better cache usage, could be a real winner.

On phone so it's hard to get links, but you get the idea. The nice thing about regions is that they allow composing borrowing and shared mutability, something that the borrow checker struggles a bit with. Regions let us alias freely, and then freeze an entire area of memory all at once. Not that Rust isnt a good approach (it is!) but there are some easier techniques on the horizon IMO.

[dmytrish]

Please demonstrate a practical and memory safe systems programming language without borrowing.

I'd be delighted to see it, because right now I am not aware of any practical way to have memory safe regions without static tracking of borrowing from these regions. It's either that or runtime checking.

[verdagon]

This might be of interest: https://verdagon.dev/blog/first-regions-prototype

It uses region-based static analysis without borrow checking: it doesn't impose aliasability-xor-mutability per object, or even per-region.

Though, if you'd like to move the goalposts further to no form of borrowing at all, then I recommend looking at languages like Forty2 and Verona, they might be what you're looking for.

[dmytrish]

I have already spent more time than I wanted on reading through verbose but elusive articles about Vale, without any insight into how this actually happens.

I have already spent too much time trying to compile Vale compiler which is a weird mix of Scala and C++ with a small Vale driver. Once it is actually written in Vale without segfaults, I'll revisit the language again.

Thanks for the Verona recommendation.

[larsberg]

Gah! Typo there. It's over 50% (66.8%) in 2 months. And over 80% in 4 months. The chart is correct, not the text :facepalm:

I'll see about whether I can push an update. Thanks for the catch!

[larsberg]

Actually, it's complicated stuff pulling together two data points: 1) 2/3 of people are confident contributing in 2 months or less 2) And 50% of people are AS PRODUCTIVE IN RUST as they were in their other language within four months

Given that #2 is talking about people who are all professional programmers and where only a small percentage of respondents previously knew Rust, that's pretty amazing to me.

[tensor]

The more relevant claim is that they don't observe a difference in learning rust vs learning other languages. There is always a learning cost when adopting a new language that few people always know.

This sort of surprised me, because rust felt a lot harder for me personally to learn than Go. But data is far more valuable than an anecdote so there you go!

[albntomat0]

The article states, in the following sentence: “Anecdotally, these ramp-up numbers are in line with the time we’ve seen for developers to adopt other languages, both inside and outside of Google”

[summerlight]

I've been studying C++ over 15+ years and still don't feel very productive thanks to the fear of getting paged every releases.

[criddell]

Does Rust give guarantees around paging? Is Rust similar to C++ in that respect?

[shepmaster]

FWIW, I believe the person you are replying to means "paged" as in "an alert was sent to my pager at 3AM that the entire system is down and I need to wake up and fix it", not the paging in/out of memory.

[criddell]

Oh wow, I totally missed that. Thanks for clearing it up.

[summerlight]

At least you won't get paged due to some weird memory bugs. Yes, this happens quite frequently. Worse, it's usually not something local to a single change but interaction across seemingly safe changes.

[criddell]

Is well written Rust code better with respect to paging than well written C++ code?

[brigadier132]

Rust code that compiles gives you certain guarantees that C++ code that compiles does not. The question isn't is well written code in one language better than well written code in another language. The question is, do I know this code is well written? In Rust you know, in C++ you don't without jumping through a bunch of other hoops.

[criddell]

What I'm trying to get to is if the guarantees include better control over the heap and paging. Everybody wants to tell me C++ likely has bugs which I understand, but it's not what I'm asking about.

Edit: I missed that the original person I responded to was talking about being paged when a problem arises and not about memory performance. I'm still curious though if Rust memory guarantees give the programmer better tools for dealing with memory paging.

[lawn]

Only four months to become as productive in a new language as in a language they have years or even decades of experience in?

Sounds incredible.

[tedunangst]

I don't think that's bad, but it's a big stretch to say 50% at four months debunks the myth of six months.

[VWWHFSfQ]

50% seems pretty good to me