Facebook, it's cool to see you using Rust and joining the foundation, but please don't Zuck it up for all of us Facebook is joining the Rust Foundation at its highest member level – and vowed to help make Rust "a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond.” Rust was conceived at Mozilla Research in 2010 by Graydon Hoare as a C/C++-like programming language with a focus on safety and speed. We like to say Google …
"“I'm really excited to see us take our contributions to the language to the next level. Joining the Rust Foundation is a great step that signals a commitment to improve the language and ecosystem for years to come.”"
Or at least until the next SuperKewlNewThang for the easily impressed/influenced to fall in love with comes along.
Potentially dangerous code can be written in any language. Good coders know this, good coders work hard to ensure there is no dangerous code. Syntax checking and analysis by rust just allows crap coders to get away with being crap. Can you imagine the horrors that will result when all these Rust programmers suddenly have to write a bit of C or C++.
I'm currently sorting some Python out & I can confirm that while code is beautifully indented and formatted, it is still shit code, uncommented and logically flakey.
I won't use Go either - any language that forces a style on you is plain old bad.
I can imagine that they would spend all that time dreaming up new algorithms and horizons and better more efficient ways of doing it.
In reality, they'll just go and yak about daytime telly and watch more soaps.
Too many programmers don't give a flying fig - if they did we wouldn't have as many security breaches, OOM errors, patch Tuesday's and segfaults as we do.
Manglement are as much to blame - quality vs quantity etc. and deadlines trump correctness.
> Can you imagine what will happen when programmers don't have to spend mental bandwidth on navigating bear traps?
They'd be using their brains? And an attention span longer than 8 seconds?
(As opposed to (a) search in Google, followed by (b) copy-and-paste from StackOverflow).
> Good coders who use Rust are prevented from the occasional mistake.
Only if Rust detects them.
Bad coders are prevented from the majority of mistakes.
There is the problem that all coders will over rely on the compiler and have the 'it must be good code because the compile was clean' attitude.
I don't see any of the those as benefits.
A good cautious slow C programmer is preferable to a dozen sloppy rust code monkeys putting blind faith in the compiler.
I struggle to see how this makes sense. Good coders will use the tools that are available to them.
Rust is one of those tools, and having the code compile does indeed detect lots of errors that you might need to test for in other languages. More time fighting the compiler in its sometimes baroque ways; less time writing tests. That's an engineering compromise like any other.
I've stopped worrying about lift doors shutting one me also, and don't use a cloth when taking an light bulb out any more, so perhaps I am becoming sloppy and have too much blind faith.
So the solution is easy: no need to use Rust, just hire only good coders. It's going to slow things down a bit, as there certainly seem to be more mediocre than good coders around.
Identifying the good ones may be tricky. Obviously this is the place to look, as it's clear that everyone contributing to this thread is an infallible coder.
Save for the fact that Rust is nothing like C. Or C++. At all.
> [ ... ] with a focus on safety and speed.
Yeah. About that speed. It ain't there. Slow and bloated? Sure.
Any other major points of FAIL for Rust that we should be excited about?
Rust's reputation is partly built on the fact that the unwashed have not had time to play with it and break it. It's used by people who have a, shall we say, particularly pedantic sense of coding already. It all smells like a false sense of security and liberal slapping of each other's backs to me. Life outside the ivory tower will not be gentle for Rust, given the expectations that have been hyped up for it.
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