Comment by dvhh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvhh | Hacker News Reader

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I have yet to touch Rust, as I am currently busy with other things and my work is in other computer language. And mostly glueing modules together.

But yes, I am one of those weirdos that use C for their personal projects, and yes I find it "fun" to fire the debugger to look for my own mistake, see my code run magnitude slower through Valgrind to find my memory errors, and yes I know that my code will be riddled with UB and other kind of "fun" error, but again that is expected because (well) it is C. And I do it on my commute while ssh-ing with my phone.

And while I am very impressed by the progress of Rust over the years. There are two aspects that kind of put me off.

The community does come as very preachy and the language sound very close to the Ada language ( as in "not fun to work with"). And so far those two haven't been disproven.

So maybe the day that I would have to write life critical software as a hobby I would consider writing in it in Rust. Or maybe in order for Rust to succeed it would have to make the other languages far less fun.

Rust is actually really fun to work with. Don't let random naysayers on hn convince you otherwise, try it for a month or three and form your own opinion.

There is something magical about wri5ing code that is as fast as C++ but with a fraction of the bugs and effort.

>> try it for a month or three and form your own opinion

Seconded. After you use it for a few months it begins to click and makes sense.

I use C and C++ when I have to work with legacy code, but choose Rust for new projects.

About the fun aspect of using Rust. Once I learned it, nothing feels as fun as Rust for two reasons - when I'm done writing the program it almost always works first try and second, when it runs I know this is the fastest possible program that I could have written.

It takes a while to get to the point where writing Rust feels easy, but when you do it's so much fun. That's why Rust users love the language so much.

To elaborate on the 2nd part: idiomatic Rust is usually slower than the absolute fastest program you could have written. Making sure you are not allocating (usually wrt to Strings and Vecs) in the hot path often takes a non trivial amount of work compared to naive solution (for ex, fighting with borrow checker instead of cloning, or or allocating your Vecs and passing results thru a mut ref parameter vs a return value) and also makes your code uglier.

That said, writing an ultra performance program in Rust is easier than using any other language in existence rn.

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