[gorjusborg]

The idea of using Rust for scripting is bizaar.

I can understand not wanting to use Python for everything, but I see the problem being the 'use it for everything' not the language choice.

Use the tool that excels at the job. There is no language that is good at everything.

[steveklabnik]

Incidentally, this thing comes up a lot: Python vs Rust for scripts. I wrote a comparison four years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22712441

And updated it six months later:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24595081

That's still how I'd do this task today.

Anyway, I don't think that Rust is always a great choice for scripting, but if you already know Rust, it's totally fine at it.

[germandiago]

Same for C++ with a good options library and std::filesystem IMHO. You can kind of script with that. I did it and was surprised it did well for some of my engine tooling.

[n_plus_1_acc]

cargo -Zscript is in nightly

[weinzierl]

> The idea of using Rust for scripting is bizaar.

Not at all, I do the same.

[natsucks]

Rust is cool now. Python is not cool anymore.

[smallstepforman]

The current project I’m working on has tons of resource caches (for performance), with tons of non-owning pointers sharing cache references. I’d hate to do this in opinionated languages like Rust.

[steve1977]

I think Python fell victim to the Peter Principle. It got promoted beyond its competence.

[germandiago]

Python does well for several reasons.

Some that come to my mind: its versatility binding native code and its easy-to-fit in your brain mental model for many tasks. The fact that you can script with Python without a compilation step also helped a lot to spread its popularity I think.

[rightbyte]

The way you define the entry point function is so bizarre I assume scripting was the original use case.

[germandiago]

Could be. But it also gives you the flexibility to set tests inside the module files.

[AnimalMuppet]

Having to use the wrong tool is not cool, ever. So I don't care how cool Rust is right now, I still am not going to use it for scripting.

[weinzierl]

Have you tried it? How would you know that Rust is the wrong tool.

I'm indifferent when it comes to Python vs Rust for scripting, but I'd take Rust over a shell script (of any variety) any day.

[AnimalMuppet]

There are many things I have not tried, ranging from Rust to heroin. "You don't know because you haven't tried it" is really bad epistemology.

It's also totally impractical. Rust isn't the only language I haven't tried; there are more than a thousand of them. I'm not using JOVIAL for scripting, or Fortran, or a bunch of others. No, I haven't tried any of those either. No, I'm not going to.

Turning specifically to Rust, I don't use it for scripting because it's not what I look for in a scripting language. It's compiled; I look for a language that doesn't have that extra step. It has the borrow checker; I don't write scripting code that needs that level of discipline and care.

In fact, most of my scripting is of the form "pick some bits out of a text file". For that, Perl is my tool of choice. Sure, other languages have regexes. None of them do it as cleanly and simply as Perl. (Note well: "clean" does not apply to the Perl syntax...)