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Eric S. Raymond: The Rust Programming Language Severely Disappoints

posted by janrinok on Monday January 16 2017, @08:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the comparing-tools dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Eric S Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", blogs via Ibiblio

I wanted to like Rust. I really did. I've been investigating it for months, from the outside, as a C replacement with stronger correctness guarantees that we could use for NTPsec [a hardened implementation of Network Time Protocol].

[...] I was evaluating it in contrast with Go, which I learned in order to evaluate as a C replacement a couple of weeks back.

[...] In practice, I found Rust painful to the point of unusability. The learning curve was far worse than I expected; it took me those four days of struggling with inadequate documentation to write 67 lines of wrapper code for [a simple IRC] server.

Even things that should be dirt-simple, like string concatenation, are unreasonably difficult. The language demands a huge amount of fussy, obscure ritual before you can get anything done.

The contrast with Go is extreme. By four days in of exploring Go, I had mastered most of the language, had a working program and tests, and was adding features to taste.

Have you tried using Rust, Go or any other language that might replace C in the future? What are your experiences?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @11:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @11:02PM (#454584)

    We need to change society so that people only live till 30. Once they reach 30 we give them a big celebration whereupon we kill them. This would truly be a utopia.

    That's not a bad idea! We'd need to give the celebration a festive sounding name, what do you think of "Carrousel"?

    We'd also, at least at first, feed them a line about being reincarnated afterwards. That way, they're not going to their deaths, they're going to "renew" themselves. Catchy! Sounds like a decent movie setting, if you can get a decent set of twentysomthing actors involved. Back in her prime, Farrah Fawcett [imdb.com] would have been a great choice for this.

    =P

  • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 17 2017, @05:42AM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Tuesday January 17 2017, @05:42AM (#454753) Homepage
    If you get the reference then you must be a runner.

  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday January 17 2017, @08:52PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 17 2017, @08:52PM (#455060)

    > Back in her prime, Farrah Fawcett would have been a great choice for this

    Yeah but in that timeframe, someone like Jenny Agutter would have been really awesome, gotta Walkabout a bit before you run...