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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The problem with this theory is that literally no one here has anything against Rust itself.

Also, and I've mentioned this before, while I spent some amount of time dreading the time I become a dinosaur, I am now filled with dread at the distinct lack of young wolves nipping at my heels. I know every older generation complains about the younger one, but surely "what's wrong with the kids today, they seem to be completely unable to replace me" is a new one?

The problem with this theory is that literally no one here has anything against Rust itself.

I have Complaints. In addition to the governance drama, the language has Made Some Tradeoffs.

Compile time remains a pain in the ass, especially on lighter-weight machines. It's strict enough to be obnoxious when writing casual code or projects small enough to hold a coherent mental model around, but not strict enough to avoid unintentional side effects or for crate-internal multithreading to be truly safe. Struct auto-management is one of those things that's really clever and also a giant footgun for portability, consistency, reliability, and just understanding wtf is going on with your data: any time you leave your own application (even to local disk!), any default (non-#[repr(C)]) struct should be treated like a dumb tuple.

((I'm also annoyed that match doesn't support case fallthrough, but I'm probably one of a handful of people on the planet that thinks that's a good idea. For other nitpicks, they missed a perfectly good opportunity to have different symbols for integer and floating-point division.))

Embedded Rust is getting better, but it's still sketchy, even on well-known and well-supported architectures and chips. To be fair, that's one of the hardest environments and the most important for all that no-mutable-shared-state safety that Rust is really trying to enforce; to be less fair, you end up with tutorials for the microcontroller equivalent of hello world that look like this and this.

It's better than Go, and I've dabbled with it; these might not even be things that can be solved (uh, except compile time; it has gotten better). But the treatment of the language as an end-all be-all overlooks a lot of the real-world experience of working with it outside of data centers.

Huh, I have complaints about rust but they're very different.

I haven't used a 'lighter-weight machine' in at least half a decade, and if I had to I'd just compile in the cloud. I just use serde any time a struct leaves memory and that's fine, and when I need threads I just use a very limited and safe abstraction - rust gives you a lot of power but you don't have to use it.

The thing I don't like about rust is ... Rust has a lot of great features, so I end up using it a lot. And for 80% of the code I write, I'm not writing tokio internals or something that needs to get the last 15% of possible performance, so I really do not care about the difference between String and &str, lifetimes, cloning, lambda mutability and capturing, not being able to pass an immutable reference to a state object around while i have a mutable reference to a child of it, there being &s everywhere because half of the methods on containers take references and half take values, ... It just takes mental effort that should be spent elsewhere. I think for people with lower g these are bigger problems, but I have a good grasp of all of them. But I'd still much rather not.

These are just a bunch of papercuts - they're pretty annoying, but all of the good parts of rust more than compensate for it. I often wish I were using a smaller rust, though. Recently some of the early rust contributors started trying to make a language like that, although the base rates on success are very low and I have some problems with the initial approach.

That's your feeling? Maybe I'm a mediocritie but I can name quite a few folks under me who, with a button up and some experience presenting (ExECuTiVe PrEsEnCe), are great substitutes.

I'm sure there's plenty of talented young guys that would beat my ass in the grand scheme of things, but the supply / demand seems to result in remarkably little fire under my ass for the time being. I might regret those words at some point, but that's how it feels like so far.

Nah, that’s common enough among boomer engineers.

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