[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-a...
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Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its
recent saga?
I've been programming in high-level languages for a while and
recently I was thinking about learning something more bare metal.
Rust stood out as one of the popular C/C++ alternatives. But for
me, the investment in a language is driven by not just the beauty
of the language itself, but the community around it. As an
outsider who's keeping an eye on Rust, am I better off sticking to
vanilla C/C++?
Author : behnamoh
Score : 9 points
Date : 2023-05-28 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
| bjourne wrote:
| Community drama is a terrible way to evaluate a language.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A decent metric for community maturity though. That absolutely
| should be a factor in deciding on a language.
|
| I'm having a real hard time seeing this unfold among the
| greybeards that call the shots in Java or C++.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Software already has a big problem with toxic childish
| behaviors.
|
| I asked my mom who used to audit businesses what was important
| about founders and CEO's and she said they more than anyone
| else set the companies culture. I feels to me like that seems
| to be true of the culture surrounding various programming
| langs.
| cookieperson wrote:
| Yes absolutely. The politics is stupid crap. If everyone in the
| rust org quit the community would continue onwards just fine.
|
| Rust is a great language with a lot of advantages and is
| absolutely worth considering for your next project.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Rust is technically excellent, and has significant buy-in from
| major corporations, who won't allowwz their investments to go to
| waste. I wouldn't worry about the drama.
| paddw wrote:
| If you have no experience with low level programming I think it
| is better to learn c first anyway. It will help you understand
| some of the problems that Rust's design solves.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Technically, the language is excellent. Organizationally, major
| corporations have invested a lot of resources into it, they won't
| allow it to fail. Community-wise, there are lots of friendly and
| supportive people in the quieter corners (this is true most
| everywhere, I think).
|
| That being said, my recommendation for learning systems
| programming would be to consider trying plain old C first. Rust's
| safety features are a godsend, but IMO easier to understand once
| you have experienced working without them. (Similarly, I like to
| recommend leaning a dynamically typed language first, and
| introducing static typing later.)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I agree with what other posters say here regarding building,
| specifically, C knowledge first.
|
| Further, I've noticed a trend highlighted by people such as
| Jonathan Blow that there are users of Rust who don't fully
| understand object lifetimes in particular systems and are hacking
| around warnings in Rust creating unsafe memory scenarios while
| being told otherwise because all of their compiler messages have
| disappeared.
|
| Some things in software engineering are hard, but you can't
| escape them. It seems like you can only defer the problem until
| you actually need to understand what's going on, and by the time
| you realize that, you'll be deep in experience with "weird holes"
| in your knowledge (as I fondly remember a (pre-?)algebra teacher
| telling me when I was discussing quaternions in middle school.)
| Lariscus wrote:
| Every community has its fair share of drama. I wouldn't worry too
| much about such things.
| FranksTV wrote:
| This kind of thing has happened forever, it's just thst before
| social media it was confined to obscure listservs and usenet
| channels and most of the people using the language would never
| see it.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| IMHO, one should make one's language choices based on utility and
| NOT solely on metacharacteristics such as quality of governance,
| DEI efforts, or nation of origin. None of these things matter
| when the program is run, if the process and end result do not
| solve the problem(s) at hand.
|
| Thorough feature discussion, appropriate licensing, and
| accessibility of source code for risk evaluation are
| metacharacteristics that are relevant.
|
| And-lest anyone think that, as a white cisgender male born in
| America, I have no skin in the game, it is my belief that any
| interactions with others ought to be principled on transparent
| rigor and mutual respect, from which all other things should
| flow.
| version_five wrote:
| _solely_
|
| I agree with that, but that stuff you mention is still a
| factor. Politics is creeping into everything, and there are
| lots of reasons why choosing a relatively politically stable
| language is important, though obviously not the only factor. I
| think the best one could hope for is a lot of diverse groups
| with different political views and motivations being invested
| in the future of a language, so that despite any culture war
| stuff, there's likely to be a useful version that survives.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Microsoft and Alphabet have plenty of motivation to keep
| things on track, as does the Linux Foundation and others. I
| suspect that, if things get completely out of hand, that
| corporate sponsors might impress their will upon the Rust
| Foundation to address any issues around governance.
|
| Politics will creep into anything, if one allows that to
| happen.
| jareds wrote:
| I was not aware that there are any recent issues with the Rust
| community since I don't use Rust. while technical
| characteristics of a language are important the ability of a
| community to continue supporting the language for the long term
| is also important. Go has Google backing it, Java has Oracle
| backing it, etc. Is there enough corporate use of Rust that if
| the current Rust community falls apart someone will create a
| stable version of the language and toolchain that will be
| maintained and updated?
| revskill wrote:
| I found programming in Rust is fun. The std library provides
| efficient implementation for your need, which made your time
| spent worth it.
|
| Whatever your goal is, it's worth your time as i see it.
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(page generated 2023-05-28 23:02 UTC)