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Comment by jjnoakes | Hacker News Reader

> it is not a language that lends itself to quick prototyping

Maybe it depends on your perspective, or maybe it is simply personal preference, but I find rust pleasant and quick to prototype in.

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> Maybe it depends on your perspective, or maybe it is simply personal preference, but I find rust pleasant and quick to prototype in.

Or, perhaps more importantly, on use case.

It’s hard for me to imagine (though certainly possible, I suppose) someone finding prototyping e.g. sensor processing algorithms in Rust more enjoyable than Julia, or faster for that matter.

It's one of the thing that annoys me the most about these discussions. The best language to prototype in is the one you know the most. For me and probably for you too, that's rust. So it's trivial for me to start a new project and have everything I need very quickly. With pretty much any other languages I need to relearn some syntax or apis which is a massive waste of time when prototyping.

I'm not here do doubt your comfort in rust, but I do think that prototyping scientific software involves more than just iterating on code. Personally, my development process of is just different for that kind of code because it's easier and faster to debug through plots than traditional logging/breakpoints/whatever. Personally, I feel more proficient in c++ than python, but I will still prototype in python. Half the reason for this is that I can set a breakpoint anywhere in program, and produce an interactive plot in about 3 seconds. Julia has a similar advantage here. Maybe there are tricks I don't know, but it's a massive pain to do this in languages like rust and c++.

I think so as well. And it's quite easy to go from prototype to production by starting from removing unwraps.

To be fair I'm not familiar with Julia so I'm not making any comparisons.

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