After many years of waiting, version 1.0 of the Rust programming language has finally been released. The Rust home page describes Rust as "a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety."
Thanks to the hard work of noted Rust core team members Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik, Rust is now poised to become a serious competitor to established systems programming languages like C and C++.
The announcement has brought much jubilation to the followers of Rust, who have been eagerly awaiting this milestone release for so long. With only 1,940 open issues and over 11,500 issues already closed, Rust is finally ready for users to build fantastically reliable software systems using it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2015, @10:35PM
Are there any benchmarks that show how fast Rust really is? The summary says it "runs blazingly fast" but that's not what I've experienced when I used the Rust compiler, which is implemented in Rust. The Rust compiler was really slow. I think it was even slower than the C++ compilers I've used, and C++ compilers are very slow compared to Delphi's compiler or even the C# compiler. How can the Rust website say that it "runs blazingly fast" without giving any proof?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @02:16AM
I haven't used Rust but I gather that it has much more complicated semantics than C, so compilation would probably would slow even if Rust were written in C or C++. But expect that to improve as optimizations are discovered and/or implemented.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TGV on Saturday May 16 2015, @07:23AM
I just read this (http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/), which has a benchmark and some other criticism. Rust seems to be 2 to 3 times slower than C, on par with Java, Go and Haskell.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Marand on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:06AM
There's also Debian's benchmark game [debian.org], for whatever it's worth. Definitely slower than C/C++, but like you said it's somewhere in the Go/Haskell/Java (and other JVM languages) area. The trade-off might be worth it for the safety if it proves itself to actually be safer, though in that speed range there's already plenty of competition with similar goals but different approaches.
Damn shame about the syntax, though. Out of curiosity I started looking at some of the Rust files in the only big project I know of using it, Servo ( https://github.com/servo/servo [github.com] ), and I swear, there are lines in it that make Perl look readable. I liked this function declaration:
pub fn match_ty_unwrap<'a>(ty: &'a Ty, segments: &[&str]) -> Option<&'a [P<Ty>]> {
I'm sure it makes sense to someone familiar with the language, but my general impression so far from poking around random Servo files is "the readability of Perl meets the conciseness of Java." What's not to love?
(Score: 2) by TGV on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:37AM
Declaration syntax is sure ugly, but I sort of get it: it's pretty much C++/Java but with colons. The passing of &mut everywhere. I don't understand why it can't get that information from the function declaration. Is it also legal to call the same function without &mut, and with a different effect? There is something in that language that isn't explained properly in all those examples and FAQs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @01:06PM
Why did they use the keyword "mut"? It makes me think of a dirty dog pissing all over the place because its penis is broken from having spent years on the street.