Putting aside my ordinary moral horror for a moment I'd like to comment on rust.

I have never seen a language that seems to have very limited use that so many people make a point of pointing out their use of so proudly and I have to wonder why.

Which one was it. The null safety or what.

@p100sch it's more that I'm not noting alot of modules or high level libraries last I looked

Do you have to gen your own bindings or something ? At first glance it just didn't look like a language that had many uses because of the lack of an accompanying lib set.

C/c++ has a very mature library set. Alot of functionality. Hell even perl has alot of modules and cpan to deliver them. What am I missing ?

No in concept it seems sound.
Just all the extras that would save 1000s of hours of programming work seem to be missing for a language being so highly praised by people on here.

I'm just skeptical of alot of the new languages

Like go or ruby or node that last which bit me in the ass.

Ruby looks like a dyslexic started pounding keys one day.

And even though python has been around forever I don't think of it as a robust application development solution.

@p100sch I think we could spend more time improving on dev options for things like c#.

What was that one which was a fad for awhile ? Valla ?

Rust is a fad. It's used primarily by a small group of fans who make their lives all about rust, and that's about it. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad language. It's just unnecessary. Pointless. It's like that reseal tape you get on a pack of cookies that no one uses, because people eat the whole pack in one go.

@hitko I like the analogy.

Good idea but noone uses it hehe

Its true that it is championed by a small caste of developers, but really, is it bad? I mean, a lot of languages, frameworks and libraries are and remain for their entire existance

That is if there is no major breakout like becoming standard for something and becoming a viable career path in the industry with steady job offers

Swift would be nothing if not replacing Objective C in the garden of Apple, same with C# if not for MS frameworks and products initially and game engines later; Python and Javascript just atracted enough people with their simplicity to find themselves trade tools for backend, ML, simple game engines and so on

Rust is currently used in the industry for its safety approach alone, so there miggt be a future to it, considering that big shots like Amazon are investing, so maybe its not that bad

@Drunkzee Go and Rust were released less than a year apart, both backed by decently-sized organisations, both aiming to improve on some shortcomings of C / C++ while maintaining similar performance and binary size. 12 years later:

https://github.com/topics/rust/...

https://github.com/topics/go/...

Top 4 Rust projects are: NodeJS clone, Electron clone, "cat" clone, and yet another terminal emulator. A little down the list you also have a "find" clone.

Top 4 Go projects are: Kubernetes, Moby toolkit, HTTP server framework, and a static website builder. Pretty high on the list is also Grafana.

See the trend? Unlike other comparable languages (I used Go here because it seems to be pretty close to Rust both in maturity and primary purpose, but fell free to suggest others), Rust is used primarily by people who somehow feel the need to rewrite existing C software in Rust.

@hitko Not gonna argue, your examples are on point, but wasn't there that Amazon project, Firecracker written in Rust as well? I might be wrong, tho

Also, regarding GH examples, there are more than just those. Deno, mellisearch, multiple terminal emulators, i wouldn't say its nothing, plus, both are still young

What would need to be built with them in order to check all boxes? An OS? I think there is a kernel written in Rust in works as well so there is that 😅

@Drunkzee You're missing the point.

People are using Rust for projects like a clone of one of the most basic Unix utils just to add shiny new features with extremely limited use case and to boast memory safety. People are using Rust for new projects where memory safety is a nice thing to have and where they're free to chose which language they prefer to use.

They're not using Rust to make a memory-safe alternative to Apache web server, even though memory safety is a key feature of Rust and over 50% of global web server vulnerabilities are due to memory management - because Rust doesn't make it any easier or faster to write a proper web server, it just helps you with memory management.

There simply isn't any software written in Rust where one could say "Wow, this [web server] is so much better than [existing web servers] because it doesn't have any memory-related problems! I should totally use it and also switch to Rust because I need to solve memory-related problems in my own software."

Without something like that, Rust will always remain just another programming language with some nice features and an awful community of annoying fanboys.

@hitko strangely that might not always accomplish anything, wings 3d is written in erlang

@hitko i get what you saying, but then maybe someone will do just that at some point

plus, many of the things written in Rust are still in their infancy, so there will be a long time till a big project like this will start, either by a company or by a person/group

But maybe after the language proves itself in the long term people will be interested in taking over m projects like this

In the end is just another lang, not a silver bullet
Not having memory issues is a good thing anyway

@hitko @drunkzee anyone seen a lib that parses c/c++ code and modules and creates organized class representations or structured data files allowing you to search for things or write logic to handle the code ?

@Drunkzee If a language doesn't have a clear purpose and people using it for that purpose, then it doesn't matter how mature it is, and the longer it takes for a language to find it's purpose, the more redundant it is.

Python, Kotlin, Go, TypeScript, Java, C#, ... all became used for their respective purposes within the first 5 years, despite being far from mature. Rust has been around for 12 years.

@hitko People work on OSes for microcontrollers, game engines, virtualization solutions with Rust already

All are projects that benefit from memory safety

There is also the aspect of added thinking complexity: for instace, Go improves parallelization by implementing already known mechanisms as first class citizens in the language, simplifying and standardizing the code; on the other size, Rust adds constraints over the ownership of memory, so it forces devs to change the way of thinking

This friction might influence the addoption rate

Keep in mind that i can't code in Rust for my life, but i find its principles and value proposition valid enough to admire it

@Drunkzee why not just alter the way another language works or compiles ? My problem is having to learn several flavors of languages AND become familiar with toolsets to look at something and say "oh yeah this is fine". Senior devs at a place i worked adopted linq to sql!

@AvatarOfKaine it might work, it would be basically transpilation from a confy language to a safer, more performant one

But as in the case with everything, even traditional compilation, it's hard and extremely opinionated to do it

I don't think or say it's not possible, but what would be the trade-offs?

@Drunkzee you were saying everything is designed or a purpose.

what was c# really designed for ? it just formalizes c++ and MOSTLY removes pointers.

sure its a java replacement, because of .net but it could have been a native compiled language. it just doesn't translate well into low level things like c/c++.

however it guarantees garbage collection in dotnet, the only framework i ever saw c# used with.

kind of my point.

c# is a good general purpose language.

its structured.

it prevents bad typing most of the time, preserves some low level functionality but really doesn't let you cause as much trouble as c/c++.

@Drunkzee so earlier some bitch was here who had previously apparently been approaching male teenage prostitutes dressed as little leaguers years back. noone bats an eye at that or any of these baby rapers. one of those thick eyeglassed homos bugs me and hones in almost immeditately on depictions of 20 something tasteful images of young women who aren't beat ass or ugly I was tagging locally as "money laundering" and "prostitution" in my organizer lol tisk tisk. god i hate 'we' lol fucking fags lol btw all this is available in their security cam footage :P

'can't hear ya, please yell at me' lol again.

personally I'd rather a dishy former whore adult female pick up on teens than these people pick up on babies and murder them more than likely in 50% of the cases.

still don't approve. but qualitatively, its not AS bad since the teens are usually monsters which they unfortunately made.

still better would be to just shoot all of them and start fresh, maybe by the end of my life I'd see a generation of normal 20 somethings heading into the future to make or not make mistakes instead of acting out humans breeding with cylons in the subtext of battlestar galactica, producing queer cylons. really really queer cylons.

@Drunkzee By the same logic I could write a program in Brainfuck and argue it's a viable programming language because it accomplishes its goal of using a minimal number of instructions to write the code.

It doesn't fucking matter how much software people write in Rust when all that software is for most practical purposes no better than existing software written in C. Memory safety offered by Rust doesn't warrant all the hassle of switching to a completely different software and programming language when you already have a working solution written in C, and it never will. It's only beneficial when you're starting from scratch. That's it. End of the story.

@hitko Nobody shoves it down your throat, you can use it if you like or use somthing else

I get you idea, but i don't see anything bad in rewritting the wheel if it's just as good. Yeah is not productive, but most people do those projects in their free time, so productivity is not always an important metric

@Drunkzee speaking of minimal look at the c/c++ syntax in grub-mkimage.c

jesus its ugly !