One of the deep-pocketed founding members of the Rust Foundation says it's easy. I'm surprised.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Wut? They're a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
While they (and everyone using Rust) will benefit off of more people using Rust, it's not like they have a vested interest to the point of spreading misinformation.
They’re a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
Fans of a programming language stating they like the programming language is hardly thought-provoking stuff. There are also apps written in brainfuck and that means nothing as well.
I'm pretty sure that's not how dyslexia works, but either way, I didn't write that. And while the title of the article suggests otherwise, the news here isn't that Google says something is easy. The news is that they published a guide to make that thing easy.
Clearly Rust is a conspiracy.
Clearly Rust is a conspiracy.
Anyone in software development who was not born yesterday is already well aware of the whole FOMO cycle:
- hey there's a shiny new tool,
- it's so fantastic only morons don't use it,
- oh god what a huge mistake I did,
- hey, there's a shiny new tool,
I assume that you do know that tools improve objectively in the cycle and are making a joke on purpose.
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Yeah, because the new tools are never actually better, right? If condescending luddites like you had your way we'd still be living in the literal stone age. At every step of the way, people like you have smugly said that the older, more established ways of doing things were good enough and new ways were just a fad that would die out.
Your favorite language was dismissed as fad when it was new. High level languages were a fad. Computing was a fad. Electricity was a fad. See a pattern?
Nice job projecting with the "only morons" bit, BTW, when it is in fact you who started off by denigrating people whose preferences are different from yours.
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The ruinous powers are plotting once more
Your mom is easy... said the deep-pocketed founding member of the Rust Foundation.
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Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust
That seems like a poor attitude imo.
A valid point tho. Generally it is difficult to ask everybody to learn a new language.
I mean, I work as a software engineering and if I'm not doing continuing ed, be it about architecture, storage, or new languages, I'm going to be of less value in the marketplace. I've learnt languages I didn't particularly want to in the past for work (though I generally came to tolerate or even like some of them. Not lua, though; lua can go to hell).
If Rust truly is the better, safer option, then these people are holding everything back.
C/C++ is the bedrock of our modern civilization in some ways more fundamental than actual bedrock, the first step in getting any OS running is making it run C and after that you are basically done, it’s not surprising that developers resist, if nothing else it’s a common language, and standards are hard to change on the best of days. This isn’t just learning a language, it’s a complete paradigm shift.
The bedrock of modern civilizations is expensive to develop, buggy and unergonomic though.
If you make C run, you probably (I'm not sure, would have to verify) can make rust run. And if there isn't yet, there will probably soon be a C compiler written in rust, so you can choose to bootstrap from wherever you prefer.
C's ABI will probably last longer than C, since there is not a stable rust ABI though.
You cannot, today, build a Rust compiler directly from C, but you're right that people are working on it. See this recent post: https://notgull.net/announcing-dozer/
Edit: you can certainly bootstrap Rust from C via C++, as the article covers. I misinterpreted the comment above.
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Fortunately, they aren’t being asked to do that. All the rust team was requesting was metadata about the call signatures so that they could have a grasp on expected behavior.
It would be a valid point if he weren't literally speaking over the people trying to tell him that they're not demanding he learn Rust: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548
It isn't unreasonable to ask someone to learn a new language, if they currently only speak Sumeric.
Oh jeeze, you have no idea. You can watch it yourself: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?si=b3OB4Y9LU-ffJA4c&t=1548
That timestamp is about where the audience member (a maintainer of ext4 and related utilities) starts speaking. The "here's the thing" quote is around 28:40.
Wow what an absolute dick
If the linux kernel had any real budget to speak of, they could hire rust experts to maintain the rust code. But the "linux" foundation spends 2% of its budget on Linux, this is the situation you end up with.
I believe that's incorrect. The reporter who started this rumor either misunderstood the meaning of the chart or was lying through his teeth. I'll find the original source and share it here later.
This is the actual source. If you simply scroll through it, you'll see they're investing in many things that move the Linux ecosystem forward. Open standards, open hardware, security in the software stack, providing for latest market needs, keeping an eye on legislation that could affect Linux, staying in touch with important entities in the industry, and so on.
Scroll down near the bottom and you'll find where the reporter got their information from. It's an expenditure chart and, sure enough, it says "Linux Kernel Support 2%" Note, however, that it also says:
- Community Tooling 5%
- Training and Certifications 7%
- Project Infrastructure 9%
- Project Support 64% (!)
Note that it doesn't say how any of them is further divided. Remember all the things I mentioned earlier? All of that is value for Linux as a whole.
Software projects aren't just about programming the big thing. Working on a large project will show you this. Could the foundation spend more on Linux? Maybe. But saying they only spend 2% on it is disingenuous.
The reporter doesn't mention this in his clickbait piece, either because he doesn't get it in the first place, or more likely because he just wants to push his views.
This is yet another example why Lunduke isn't a credible source of news.
I mean aren't they forcing everyone else to learn C/C++ otherwise? If we follow that logic, at least
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That seems like a poor attitude imo.
Why do you believe that forcing something onto everyone around you is justifiable? I mean, if what you're pushing is half as good as what you're claiming it to be, wouldn't you be seeing people lining up to jump on the bandwagon?
It's strange how people push tools not based on technical merits and technological traits, but on fads and peer pressure.
It is literally being pushed for its technical merits and traits.
Memory safe code with comparable performance in the kernel seems like an absolute no brainer.
Also if you watch the video all he's asking for is consistent interfaces for the file systems. He's not even trying to get them to use rust. And the guy starts screeching about how he'll code however he wants.
Is it wrong to expect a consistent and well documented interface?
Pretty sure C is actually being pushed against its technical merits here.
It's wrong to force it. Most choices in history don't end up with the best one being used. Beta was better than VHS for example. Rust people are very bad at convincing others to try it, and objectively many people just don't want to or don't like it for various reasons.
Personally I highly dislike the syntax. People like familiar things, and to me it's just too different from C++.
If anything I think Swift will be an easier sell when the speed and cross-platform issues are solved.
I don't think that everyone has to switch to rust or anything but "I dislike the syntax" and "I only want familiar things" are really bad arguments for not using a language. Try something outside of your comfort zone for a bit, it will help you grow as a programmer.
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I think the point is they aren't forcing it at all. It's being used with the blessing of Linux Jesus and the others are just throwing their toys out of the pram because they don't want to learn it.
Someone else linked the video on this post. They are rude as hell and the rust dev isn't even asking them to use it.
Again I think that's a bad attitude towards technology. Use the best tool for the job and you'd get used to the syntax pretty quickly.
It's like someone who started on python not wanting to learn a c style language.
It starts with "no, you don't have to learn it",
to "your changes are breaking Rust stuff, let's waste time together to fix it, else I call it 'bad attitude'"
to "you better make your stuff that way if you don't want to break Rust stuff (and waste your time me)"
to "do it my way, Rust is taking longer to fix and I would have to refactor all the code because of the lifetime cancer"
to the original senior kernel dev saying: "fuck it, I quit, the kernel is such a mess with the Rust BS" ... People don't want you at the party, make your own party with your own friends we don't want you here
It's not complicated.
I mean I've still yet to hear a reason not to use rust tbf.
But yes that's what working in a team is like.
I have to do stuff at work so I don't fuck over the frontend team. I don't throw a little tantrum about it.
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Beta was not better than VHS. Anybody could build a competing VHS machine, and it supported feature length films.
I would go so far as to say that yes most choices do end up with the best one being used, because people like nice things. Programmers just aren't persuasive people in general, give it time.
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2024: Google says replacing C/C++ with Rust is easy
2025: Google buys Rust
2026: Google shuts down Rust
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They need to tell that to Theodore Ts’o.
If the target for the firmware has stdlib already implemented, my experience has been that it is indeed easy with minimal experience in the language.
Mixing "firmware" with "easy with minimal experience" in the same sentence makes me cringe...
That's fair. To be clear, I meant minimal experience with the Rust programming language. I've mainly tinkered with ESP32 types of MCUs in Arduino and CircuitPython when it comes to firmware, but have much more software experience. In some ways, I found the little bit of Rust that I tried easier because of the tooling - defaulting to a CLI tool to flash rather than an IDE is much more comfortable for me.
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Rust is one of those things that every time I look into it, I don't really follow what makes it so good. What's a good starter project to learn the language and get a sense of what makes it worthwhile over the established stuff?
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If your alternative is C++ then it removes the enormous burden of manually tracking lifetimes and doing manual memory management. C++ does have RAII which helps with that enormously but even then there are a gazillion footguns that Rust just doesn't have - especially with the newer stuff like rvalue references, std::move, coroutines etc. It also saves you from C++'s dreaded undefined behaviour which is everywhere.
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It has a very strong (and nicely designed) type system which gives an "if it compiles it works" kind of feel, similar to FP languages like Haskell (so they say anyway; I've not used it enough to know). The borrow checker strongly pushes you to write code in a style that somehow leads to less buggy code. More compiler errors, but much less debugging and fixing bugs.
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The libraries and APIs are generally very well designed and nice to use. If you've ever used Dart or Go think how nice the standard library is compared to JavaScript or PHP. It took C++ like 2 decades to get
string::starts_withbut Rust started with it (and much more!). -
Fast by default.
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Modern tooling. No project setup hassle.
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It's a value based language, not reference based. References are explicit unlike JavaScript, Java, C#, etc. This is much nicer and makes things like e.g. copying values a lot easier. JavaScript's answer for ages was "serialise to JSON and back" which is crazy.
Downsides:
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Slow compilation sometimes. I'd say it's on par with C++ these days.
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Async Rust is kind of a mess. They shipped an MVP and it's still kind of hard to use and has unexpected footguns, which is a shame because sync Rust avoids footguns so well. Avoid async Rust if you can. Unfortunately sometimes you can't.
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Interop with C++ is somewhat painful because Rust doesn't have move constructors.
Great language overall. Probably the best at the moment.
I disagree with 5.
I am an electronics engineer, so admittedly only ever worked with C and Python scripting (and not a programmer by any means) but I literally stopped learning rust for embedded because every single tooling setup step was wrong or failed for both chips I was testing out (NRF chip and an esp32-C3). Maybe only embedded rust was still a mess tooling-wise, but I have no use case for learning userspace rust first. It would just be a waste of my limited free time 😅
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