Thoughts on Rust?

[Guest]

Like the title suggests, what are your thoughts on the Rust language?

I plan to experiment with it once I have some spare time.

[mtwest]

What sort of thoughts are you looking for: how easy is it to learn, what other languages is it like, or what is it good for?

[Merkey]

I was thinking of learning it too, but decided not to. Its new and has small documentation only available on their website, so learning Rust us quite hard. Otherwise it could be useful. It promises to be fast and memory safe. On Stackoverflow*, Rust programmers have I think the highest salary of all languages. I have mixed feelings of it...

 

Edit: *Stackoverflow survey 2016

Edited September 20, 2017 by Merkey

[Guest]

8 hours ago, mtwest said:

What sort of thoughts are you looking for: how easy is it to learn, what other languages is it like, or what is it good for?

More general thoughts I suppose. I'm not that worried on how easy it is to learn.

7 hours ago, Merkey said:

I was thinking of learning it too, but decided not to. Its new and has small documentation only available on their website, so learning Rust us quite hard. Otherwise it could be useful. It promises to be fast and memory safe. On Stackoverflow*, Rust programmers have I think the highest salary of all languages. I have mixed feelings of it...

 

Edit: *Stackoverflow survey 2016

Interesting survey, kinda surprised that it was the most "Beloved language" considering it came the year before.

That survey enlightened me in that we all need to be using Big Macs per year with proper regional pricing to get a sense of international salary.

Edit: I guess the first stable release was in 2015 but it was available before hand.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Guest

[Sebivor]

I have no opinion on the language, sadly, and not because I don't want to learn it... I do, but it's hard to justify reading a book that doesn't have exercises, because I don't get the feedback that I might've understood this incorrectly, and so there's no way to ensure that what I'm learning is compatible with what reality is. When the book people refer me to has only exercises of the form "attempt to compile this code... What will this code print when x is 3?", it feels disconnected, like what you're learning is meaningless, and that's about all I get from that book, at least in the opening two chapters. It opens with a cliche "hello world" derivation made famous by K&R2E.

Okay, K&R2E was a brilliant book, but that opening is not the only gem, nor is it even the most useful. Consider exercise 1-23; this is my favourite. The exercise is to write a program which removes comments from a C source file. This is not just a complex, disconnected exercise. It forces you to revisit the content of previous chapters to ensure your definitions of "comment", "string literal" and "character constant" is the same as what the language specifies, because you'll likely want to test your code to feel some form of accomplishment, and you'll likely fix any bugs you find. This kind of exercise makes people feel accountable for their effort.

Rust doesn't appear to have anything this dense, and yet this thorough and engaging, and that's a problem for me, and it should be a problem for anyone who learns better with exercises than without... which is everyone... right? Please tell me you learn better with well-designed exercises, right?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Sebivor said:

Snipped

I could understand that, I just usually study a chapter, than test the behavior with several experiments to get a better understanding of the language, as for exercises (If my experiments didn't count), I would create a game that tested my ability to program core concepts(Within reason of course, I'm no game designer) and pushes me to investigate behaviors more. Call me odd but I hardly use well thoughtout experiments others made (Knowingly of course). Maybe in a few years we will have better resources to study for rust.

[madknight3]

I've briefly played around with the basics but I haven't had the time to fully dive into language. With that said I've been following its progress for a while so the below information is me parroting what I've heard/read.

 

Rust probably isn't very suitable as a first language for complete beginners, however, it seems like there's enough to get someone with some previous experience going.

 

They are in the midst of a full rewrite of the official rust book (chapters 2 - 8 done and the rest in the editing process, progress here) so it appears to be at the point where it's worth reading over the first edition (and supplement as necessary). Another popular resource is Rust by Example. And there's quite a few blogs/tutorials/talks out there to find for additional resources.

 

There's a very active rust subreddit which you can follow for information/asking questions/etc. It has some additional resources linked in the side bar.

 

There are also a few "Are we ___ yet?" sites for rust that, if up to date (I'm not sure), might give you a general idea of how rust is doing in some specific spaces.

Are we (I)DE yet?

Are we web yet?

Are we game yet?

Are we (machine) learning yet?

[Sebivor]

5 minutes ago, tjcater said:

I could understand that, I just usually study a chapter, than test the behavior with several experiments to get a better understanding of the language, as for exercises (If my experiments didn't count), I would create a game that tested my ability to program core concepts(Within reason of course, I'm no game designer) and pushes me to investigate behaviors more. Call me odd but I hardly use well thoughtout experiments others made (Knowingly of course). Maybe in a few years we will have better resources to study for rust.

While there are some exercises which aren't so structurally bound to the language, I think those which are structurally bound to the language will be the most revealing of the language. Every now and then I look at the Rust book to see if they've added any exercises. I open it up to a random page and just read somewhere. Fascinating stuff, really, but it needs exercises.

Good exercises are much less likely to be found or even decent if they have to come from elsewhere, though it can't get much less decent than todays random selection which makes assumptions regarding the machine code which will be emitted...
 

Spoiler

and yet has left me hanging with an assumption that I'd know. I was legitimately interested in it showing me which Javascript source code my compiler would emit when instructed to target emscripten, because, you know... that's actually a useful thing to know how to do. It won't tell you much about performance, but it'll tell you how unreasonable the compiler is...

 

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, madknight3 said:

There are also a few "Are we ___ yet?" sites for rust that, if up to date (I'm not sure), might give you a general idea of how rust is doing in some specific spaces.

Are we (I)DE yet?

Are we web yet?

Are we game yet?

Are we (machine) learning yet?

Neat sites, bookmarked Are we game yet? and may mess around with the source codes to get a feel of how engines work (Never really used an engine, just made primitive games)

9 minutes ago, Sebivor said:

Good exercises are much less likely to be found or even decent if they have to come from elsewhere, though it can't get much less decent than todays random selection which makes assumptions regarding the machine code which will be emitted...

Hadn't gotten that far in to the book/documentation but that's cringe worthy.

[Lumi]