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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Rust syntax is horrible compare to Python / Go, I don't see how you could give an advice to someone that do Python to use Rust, you lose GC and add a great layer of complexity / learning curve. No thanks. Seriously when I see that:

struct IRBlock<'b, 'a: 'b> { pool: &'b mut (ConstantPool<'a> + 'a), // other fields omitted }

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GC is not a feature in all cases, and without GC you must manually handle allocation and deallocation in some cases, C or C++ let you free of lifetime annotations at the cost of crashes, Swift force you to use counted pointers and Rust force you in a semantic that forbid errors at the cost of some lifetime allocation that you consider ugly. But it is still shorter than copy pasted Go code to simulate generics, and multiple "err, res" that stains the code.

My point is a lot of people use Python because it's a simple and powerful language, Rust is not a simple language at all. And the performance it brings is not enough to make the decision to switch language in most cases.

It's not about "switching" languages - it's about making sure the languages you do use solve the problems you care about. Honestly, nobody cares what language you use as an individual other than perhaps your coworkers.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. The article didn't advise people to switch from Python to Rust. It simply gave information that people that are considering it. The last paragraph even echoes some of your sentiment.

> And the performance it brings is not enough to make the decision to switch language in most cases.

That's assuming a lot. Nearly 10x the speed is extremely useful for some people. Presumably if you are rewriting your Python code in Rust or Go, you've already identified performance as a big reason to do so, and that gain would be extremely useful.

"Rewriting anything takes a lot of time and causes lots of bugs, going from Python to less expressive language means an increased maintenance burden. But if for some reason, you still want to rewrite it, please don’t pick Go. Rust is better in pretty much every way."

I mean it's pretty much 'never use Go'

Yeah, the article boils down to "If you feel the need to rewrite your python in a statically typed language, and it's between Rust and Go, don't use Go, because the cost of implementing in Rust is roughly equivalent, but the performance gains are much higher."

I think with all the evidence presented, that's an eminently defensible position. Get twice the performance of Go (in this case, obviously it will be very dependent on project) for not much more effort, when you've already made the choice to rewrite for performance.

Rust isn't trying to be "simple", it's trying to solve a specific problem. If you don't need a systems language that has exceptional memory safety, then Rust simply isn't the right language for you. That doesn't make it "horrible" for those who actually need it.

Most programs don't need to max out the performance of the CPU. So what? There are a lot that do.

You're not expected to decide to switch to anything. I deal with at least four distinct programming languages every single day I have the good fortune to regain consciousness. Both Python and Rust are often among them. Feel free to learn more than one programming language; no one is expecting you to 'switch.'

> C or C++ let you free of lifetime annotations at the cost of crashes

This is so very true. A lot of my time as a professional C and C++ developer is spent trying to figure out exactly how long some previous programmer intended a value to live, whether it can be safely accessed in this context without a lock, etc. The ugliness of <'b, 'a: 'b> is vastly preferable to segfaults or corruption in production and days of debugging.

Anyway, time for me to go back to staring at why this machine isn't reinstalling because wget is hitting a null pointer dereference, but I'm sure wget's code is very pretty.

I basically sigh with relief whenever I'm wrangling with some data in a large c++ codebase and discover that it is refcounted (which tends to be the case for most data where the question of possibly holding it past the lifetime arises).

In rust, my reaction is the opposite -- I'm skeptical of every Rc I see and part of my mind immediately tries to see if it can be gotten rid of.

Why is this getting downvoted? Please don't downvote if you disagree with this viewpoint. Rust has its reasons for is current form, which is OK! In general, the whole song and dance around GC is a hard problem.

I agree that the syntax is cryptic. I also think that programs are written by humans for human consumption (for accomplishing a certain task).

If you have a long term plan, you might want to factor in the talent pool, hardware cost, and tech debt. For your case, if that leads to Rust, so be it. Or if it means Python, that is fine too.

Likely because it's presented as a rebuttal to the article, when the article makes no such claim. It's a non-sequitur at best, and possibly a straw-man argument.

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