[HN Gopher] Yes, I am still learning Rust
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Yes, I am still learning Rust
Author : lukastyrychtr
Score : 84 points
Date : 2020-03-12 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (llogiq.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (llogiq.github.io)
| klodolph wrote:
| I'm still learning Rust, but I'm developing a deeper appreciation
| for Go. I've already _learned_ Go. As far as I can tell, I'm a Go
| expert.
|
| Rust has a pretty large surface area. There's a ton of places
| where you can get overwhelmed by choices. For example, when
| you're working with slices, you might find yourself thinking
| about the pros and cons of different approaches using indexes,
| convenience functions, pattern matching, or iterators.
|
| It's a big toolbox, and sometimes I wish I had a smaller toolbox,
| even if it means giving up the choice of which tools to keep.
|
| So, I'll still be learning Rust for a while, too.
| chewxy wrote:
| There has to be a learning strategy for kitchen sink languages
| though.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| You could just pick the first option that looks good enough and
| be done with it so you avoid having to understand them all.
| 01100011 wrote:
| They're not really the same thing, IMO. Sure, Go is pitched as
| a systems language, but when Google themselves are rewriting OS
| components written in Go with Rust, you know something is up.
| Go seems like Python++... a more reliable and performant high
| level language. The GC nature makes it inappropriate, IMO, for
| low-level systems work. Sure, write apps in it. Fine. But I
| can't see writing drivers in Go.
| clktmr wrote:
| Pretty much what I am thinking. When I use Rust, at the end of
| the day I will have spent more time with the language instead
| of my actual task, and I don't see this changing given the rate
| Rust is still changing. It feels like you have to be a
| "programming language afficionado" to use Rust properly.
|
| Whereas in Go, there is always only one reasonable way to do a
| specific task. You almost forget about the language and just
| get stuff done.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| That's why I was drawn to Python, and I still haven't found a
| good reason to switch to Go in my use cases.
| cft wrote:
| Here is a very practical example.
|
| We chose Rust for the current project because our Python
| program took more than 1TB of RAM. Rust program carefully
| manually laying out memory takes 75G. Other choices in this
| case are C/C++, but after you get a hang of Rust, it's
| actually easier because you don't spend days inspecting core
| dumps in gdb.
| billconan wrote:
| I am researching a backend programming language for a future
| project. I am debating if I should choose rust fearing for the
| difficulty of hiring.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I think that you'll actually attract all the right people.
| billconan wrote:
| But we need to control the burning rate. (We are a startup)
| the right people are expensive.
| jaza wrote:
| Rust is still new and shiny, and is still evolving at a rapid
| pace. Everyone's still learning Rust, I'd imagine that even Rust
| core contributors are still learning Rust! (The same can be said
| for most other languages too, although not all to the same
| extent). Anyone who is looking for Rust talent right now, and who
| discards the CVs of people "still learning", clearly knows
| nothing about Rust, nor about hiring good devs.
| melling wrote:
| 1.0 was released 5 years ago.
|
| Swift is younger and I think it's a great language.
|
| If the tooling is ready and I don't have to fight it, I'd be
| fine using Rust. I just need a reason. Anyone using it for iOS
| development?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| My employer, Cloudflare, is using Rust as part of the 1.1.1.1
| app on iOS.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Is this code shared across platforms?
| Klonoar wrote:
| I've actually got a working set of bindings to AppKit/UIKit
| that I'm trying to get to a release-able point. They run fine
| on both macOS and iOS; for the former I've also got decent
| support for sandboxed environments.
|
| My goal is to write all my stuff in Rust, because I am sick
| and tired of writing products for the Apple ecosystem and
| then having to rewrite them if I want them outside of it.
|
| I don't enjoy writing browser-wrapped applications (though
| they have their place, let me be clear...). I don't want to
| write in C just to be able to compile anywhere. IMO, Rust is
| the future.
|
| /end fanboy-ism I suppose
| weiming wrote:
| If you can share, how usable is your approach
| boilerplate/types wise? Would love to go all into Rust but
| the AppKit/etc. bindings get clunky very easily.
| ElderKorihor wrote:
| I love Rust, but it doesn't have a strong UI development
| story yet.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| very few languages do, and those that do it is usually for
| just one platform.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| Because native UI is on the decline unfortunately. Its
| too complicated and there are too many different systems.
| If you want a gui in rust you would be better off having
| your program start a web server on localhost.
| weiming wrote:
| It's very easy to cross-compile and use Rust as a library,
| leaving the Swift portion for display/views only. We are
| looking at doing this for our next app (OS X, but would work
| just as fine for iOS).
| markmm wrote:
| Rust is a terrible language. It has an identity crisis. Thinks
| it's a high level but also system level language. You cant be
| both. The unix philosophy always wins. Do one thing well. C is
| the perfect system lang and Java/C#/Lisp/Python etc are the cream
| of high level langs.
| Bekwnn wrote:
| I find this to be one of the reasons I didn't find rust that
| appealing as an C++ alternative. Its safety is something I admire
| and is highly valuable to many domains, but the two main things I
| want to abandon with C++ are its complexity and its compile
| times. Rust doesn't seem to get away from either of those.
|
| As someone who doesn't really use Rust, does anyone who does find
| the complexity detracts from it a bit as a language? Is there
| effort to reduce complexity with the language or does it mostly
| embrace it?
|
| At this point I find myself mostly looking at modern C
| alternatives--ones which manage to stay relatively simple the way
| C does, but with a few additional features and better designs
| (Zig, Odin, maybe Jai, etc).
|
| All that said, I work with C++ and so I could see myself
| potentially working with Rust in the future, so I'm curious how
| people feel about its complexity, especially given that its
| complexity will presumably only increase with time.
| brundolf wrote:
| > Is there effort to reduce complexity with the language or
| does it mostly embrace it?
|
| You're right that it isn't a "simple" language (in the Rich
| Hickey sense of the word). And I don't think there's any effort
| to actively _simplify_ it.
|
| However, I do expect the rate of complexity _growth_ to taper
| off fairly soon. Every feature that gets added to Rust is added
| carefully and with a clear vision in mind. Up until now they
| 've still been building out the foundations of what most people
| will need when using Rust in different contexts. Recently a lot
| of this has been ergonomics (like async/await). But I think the
| rate of features being added is an S-curve, and I think we're
| nearing the top. Given that, I have hope that it won't follow
| the same path as C++ in terms of sprawl; it's certainly not as
| complicated as C++ yet, and if it doesn't keep growing at this
| rate, I don't think it will become that way.
|
| Part of why C++ is so complicated is that it's had to tack-on
| decades of language advancements, after the fact, as they were
| invented/became prevalent. Heck, C++ itself is already a tack-
| on of C. There wasn't a clear initial vision for the past
| couple decades of "stuff".
|
| Rust, on the other hand, a) has those decades of ideas to
| incorporate from the outset in a cohesive way, and b) was
| started from scratch, not an extension of an existing language.
| This has so far meant a much clearer sense of vision and big-
| picture design. These features were made to work together; the
| roadmap was fairly clear from the beginning.
| nunja wrote:
| This. Exactly. Also, there is definitely an ongoing effort to
| make the language simpler, not in the type system which
| arguably is getting more complex, but in the way the borrow
| checker is getting smarter. Might be imperceptible at first
| but really brings a lot in term of ergonomics and
| productivity.
| brundolf wrote:
| Simplifying the borrow checker is a slightly different
| question than simplifying "the language" (meaning the
| syntax and/or behavior of the syntax), because the latter
| can break backwards-compatibility (which is why it likely
| won't happen).
|
| But the borrow checker is an interesting case because
| simplifying its rules in such a way that they're more
| tolerant (without sacrificing safety) might reduce
| cognitive overhead while still being fully backwards-
| compatible.
| nunja wrote:
| Yeah ! That's was the point I was trying to make. It was
| a breath of fresh air when I switched from Rust 2015 to
| Rust 2018, without obvious change in the language from my
| point of view.
| ragona wrote:
| I find that I rarely touch the most complicated parts. Sure, it
| has a rich type system with all kinds of magic you can do with
| generics and such, but if you're just making an application you
| often don't have to futz with it. You can also often get away
| without even providing a type. If you're working on deep data
| structures and libraries it gets more complicated, as it
| should. It's a language that allows you to specify the behavior
| of your program quite precisely, and in many cases you don't
| have to worry much. Little things like allowing a clone here or
| there when it isn't a tight loop go a long way towards
| simplicity.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The problem is that there's no standard definition of
| "complexity," and so not only is it really hard to answer your
| question, it's also really hard to compare one language's
| complexity to another.
|
| I personally subscribe to the "waterbed theory of complexity",
| that is, I believe that the world is complex, and often,
| attempts to remove complexity cause it to pop up somewhere
| else. Rust's goals have an inherent level of complexity to
| them, and so require a certain degree of complexity to
| accomplish. There is an argument that if we had dropped one or
| two of those goals, we could have made a language that is
| _much_ simpler, but I 'm also not sure Rust would be as popular
| if we did.
|
| One thing we strive for with Rust is that features are
| reasonably _orthogonal_ and work well together, without weird
| corner cases. We also try to only add more features when the
| cost is actually justified. We have said "no" to a lot of
| things. We have also tried and rejected a lot of things.
|
| You also may enjoy this blog post of mine:
| https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-language-strangeness-budg...
|
| (I should also note that I'm not actually on the lang team, so
| this is more of a statement about what I observe and my own
| opinion rather than policy, strictly speaking.)
| 01100011 wrote:
| > attempts to remove complexity cause it to pop up somewhere
| else
|
| Yes, but sometimes the average brain is better at dealing
| with certain types of complexity. C++, IMO, puts the
| complexity in the wrong places. Programming is inherently
| complex, but it shouldn't be any more so than it needs to be
| and the complexity should be of the type humans can manage,
| as much as possible anyway.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I don't disagree! Well, I might disagree that they put it
| in the "wrong" place exactly; I think that the committee is
| doing the best that they can given their goals and
| constraints. I do not have the same goals and constraints,
| and therefore prefer to use other languages.
| fogleman wrote:
| A little weird that you didn't mention Go, which seems to fall
| exactly in the category of "a simple, modern, well-designed C"
| nicoburns wrote:
| From my perspective, Rust is a lot less complex than C++. It
| does still have a lot of features, but there are a couple of
| mitigating factors:
|
| 1. The features tend to be intuitive to use, and work in the
| way you expect them to. 2. If you do make a mistake, this tends
| to be a compile time error with a helpful error message that
| explains what you've done wrong. 3. The most complicated
| features are rarely used. Most of my Rust reads like
| TypeScript.
|
| Part of the problem with C++'s complexity is not only is it
| difficult to work out the correct incantation, but it's
| difficult to know whether you have or not. Rust almost
| completely takes away that uncertainty.
|
| The compile times are definitely an issue unfortunately.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > So, yes, I am still learning Rust.
|
| I have always been very cautious about how much I tout my skill
| with C++. Sure, I know a bunch. Probably a good bit more than the
| average bear. But the scope of C++ is enormous (even if you stop
| at C++03 there is a lot to know). And with new language standards
| it keeps growing.
|
| Despite ~two decades of experience, I list my skill level with
| C++ as "intermediate" because "expert" paints a bullseye on your
| forehead. I could imagine tons of C++ questions that I could not
| answer off the top of my head. Those probably disqualify me as an
| expert and would involve a lot of embarrassing backpedaling in an
| interview.
|
| I wonder how many times my resume was discarded because they
| needed someone with more than "intermediate" level experience
| with C++?
| [deleted]
| chris_st wrote:
| At my last job, we were trying to hire an expert C++
| programmer, and every interview our C++ wizard would ask, "How
| do you rate your C++ knowledge on a scale of 1..10?" and pretty
| much invariably get a "8 or 9!" kind of answer.
|
| Then came the C++11 and C++14 questions, and yeah, they didn't
| have a clue.
|
| The guy they hired admitted that he _wasn 't_ a wizard, but
| said that he really wanted to become one.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| This self-assessment ignorance phenomenon is well documented
| under the name Dunning-Kruger effect [1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_ef
| fec...
| jerf wrote:
| "I wonder how many times my resume was discarded because they
| needed someone with more than "intermediate" level experience
| with C++?"
|
| Don't be afraid to write "expert" with an * with an
| explanation. You pass the initial screen and anyone hiring an
| "expert C++ programmer" who won't understand that caveat you
| gave just there is probably someone you don't want to work for
| anyhow....
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| I wouldn't hesitate to place "Expert" on your resume if you
| feel you are exceedingly competent in many, but not all, areas.
|
| No one should be expected to have rote memorization of all
| language, compiler and platform features. That is just a
| ridiculous standard (and I know many organizations interview
| against it regardless). But, if you are a true master of your
| craft, it should only take you a day or 2 to ramp up on one of
| the more esoteric areas of your skillset. A master can quickly
| swap hats, assuming they are all more-or-less the same brand.
| This is a point I would try to drive home during an interview
| if you feel the perception is slipping. "I haven't dabbled in
| [XYZ framework feature] lately, but I could probably pick it
| back up in a few days." If I were running the interview, that's
| all I'd need to hear to put my mind at ease.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I wonder how much this over-modest attitude of us continual
| learners is turning hiring into a market for lemons. That is,
| you are an "intermediate", but the overconfident person who's
| been doing C++ for two years and is touting themselves as an
| expert gets hired instead and you get to fix their disasters
| five years later.
|
| And I bet this affects women and other minorities in tech
| disproportionately.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't remember which talk it was, but it was comparing an
| okay dev to a good dev; There was a slide where the "okay" dev
| rated their C++ knowledge as a 8 or 9, the "good" dev rating it
| as a 5 or a 6 and Bjarne Stroustrup rating it as a 7.
|
| [edit]
|
| Some googling later:
| https://www.slideshare.net/olvemaudal/deep-c/255
| phaemon wrote:
| "The object does not know about it's functions"
|
| That should be "its". Still, that's one way to force a fact
| into my brain...
| stephen82 wrote:
| The best thing that could have happened to you is to get
| interviewed in C (!!!) when then position is supposedly for
| C++, and eventually you learned from people that worked for
| that company, that they just wanted a WordPress webmaster LOL!
|
| I'm not kidding, this is what happened to me 4 years ago.
|
| Don't worry about your intermediate level.
|
| For sure I can honestly say that I am more than honored to have
| a 'PhD' in C++'s "hello world" :D
|
| It's a language that I would love to work on exclusively for
| the rest of my life, if I could get hired much like those
| stories we read about back in the early '90s.
|
| They were hiring pretty much anyone who had an interest in
| computing, even if they were working on something completely
| unrelated to technology, and they were willing to train them.
|
| The fun times...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That sounds like a disaster employment situation for someone
| who actually wants to develop a career in C++. In what way is
| that a win?
| samatman wrote:
| It sometimes happens that any steady paycheck is a win.
|
| Hope it never happens to you! But yes, it can happen.
| BubRoss wrote:
| I don't think how you rate yourself should be based on the
| percentage of features and caveats that you know, it should be
| more based on how effective you are using it.
| viraptor wrote:
| My story for discovering that skill is not a single metric was
| trying describe my c# some time ago, which I learned from a
| completely different side than most people:
|
| - I've done heavily multithreaded network server running on
| mono/Linux
|
| - I've implemented faster virtual method dispatch for a custom
| CIL compiler
|
| - I've never touched popular .NET frameworks or GUI apps
|
| Do I know lots about c#? yes. Would I pass a c# test for an
| average job? there's a good chance I wouldn't because I don't
| know "that thing everyone else uses".
|
| I started listing languages in the "what did I achieve in that
| job" section rather than separate list.
| dominotw wrote:
| I learnt clojure _the language_ in a couple of hours.
|
| Ofcourse, I am still learning the library and how to do things
| better in a functional way. But I was good to go with the
| language in a couple of hours.
| ithrow wrote:
| Me too, but I had already done SICP(scheme), without that I
| guess it would have take me much longer. Your background
| matters.
| sdegutis wrote:
| And by writing Clojure, you lose a lot of type safety and
| compile-time efficiency. Not that that's a bad thing, just
| pointing out that there's a trade-off that it makes in favor
| of a simpler language to learn and implement. There's also
| the matter of it being more verbose to represent certain
| concepts in Clojure due to lack of syntax, but that's harder
| to argue.
| dominotw wrote:
| > just pointing out that there's a trade-off that it makes
| in favor of a simpler language to learn and implement.
|
| I am not sure thats a tradeoff, ruby and python didn't gain
| anything in terms 'lack of syntax' by trading off 'type
| safety and compile-time efficiency.'
| ohazi wrote:
| There's the now famous anecdote that even Stroustrup rates
| himself a 7/10 at C++ proficiency.
|
| I've also worked on a handful of largeish (10k - 100k line) C++
| projects both pre and post C++11, and also consider my C++
| proficiency intermediate, even though I'm comfortable with the
| language and know how to fill in the gaps when I need to figure
| out something new, which now happens every 3 years.
|
| The language is enormous and complicated, and most people will
| forget how some of the rarer intricacies work if they don't use
| them frequently. And since most features are very useful in a
| few situations, but are not widely useful enough to change
| daily programming habits, this is basically guaranteed.
|
| The language is so big that intermediate is probably just the
| top of the scale now.
|
| Rust isn't _that_ big yet (although it is getting more
| complex), but many more of the concepts in Rust are somewhat
| unique to the language, so you 're not just learning new
| syntax. I think the "always intermediate / always still
| learning" feeling happens earlier with Rust than with C++
| because of this.
| tus88 wrote:
| It's like C++ - no-one can ever know it all.
| brundolf wrote:
| I used to put every technology I had any experience with on my
| resume.
|
| Then I started only listing the ones I knew the best.
|
| Now what I do is treat the list as aspirational. "Here are the
| technologies that I'd like to work with (and which I'm familiar
| enough with that I could figure the rest out on a job)." I try to
| paint a story with those technologies: this combination of
| technologies draws an outline around the type of work I want to
| be doing.
|
| I did this recently with Rust on the list even though I've only
| done a couple of personal projects with it, and the presence of
| it specifically made me stand out to a company that I'll soon be
| starting a position at! They use Rust and are sort of a dream job
| in a couple other ways too. They said the presence of that
| language spoke to the personality of the developer, and the kind
| of things he was likely interested in.
|
| Takeaways: don't undersell yourself, and tell a coherent story.
| sjtindell wrote:
| That's tough because often I've had coworkers who give their
| thumbs up or thumbs down based on "he had it on his resume and
| I asked him basic question X and he had no idea, terrible".
| brundolf wrote:
| You should be able to answer the basic questions, but you
| shouldn't need years of professional experience with
| something to feel like you can list it without a "learning "
| prefix
| pselbert wrote:
| During the coding exercise portion of an interview I let them
| choose any language they like. The exercise is exceptionally
| simple and doesn't push the boundaries of their language
| knowledge at all.
|
| If somebody can't do the exercise in their language of choice
| I have doubts about their competency in general. That seems
| different than asking arbitrary questions about specific
| language constructs.
| goostavos wrote:
| "He used a for loop instead of a list comprehension. he
| clearly isn't actually a Python programmer" -- actual debrief
| comments :|
| saagarjha wrote:
| Everyone knew PEP 20 was feel-good baloney anyways. It just
| took the Python programmers a bit longer to come around.
| koyote wrote:
| I flunked an interview in a similar manner several years
| ago.
|
| Hadn't done Java in around half a decade but the company
| recruiter said that it's not an issue (they contacted me).
|
| Then I got a 30-minute online coding test that I had to do
| in Java. Took me a while to remember the syntax but
| finished the required problem in time and without
| issues/bugs.
|
| In the end I got dinged for not using the Java Arrays
| library for copying an array (used a manual for loop)...
| brundolf wrote:
| Personally I wouldn't want to work at a company like that
| ryuukk_ wrote:
| excuses
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(page generated 2020-03-12 23:00 UTC)