Rust 2017 Survey Results
blog.rust-lang.org
blog.rust-lang.org
This suggests that it would help to have better getting-started guides for vim, and for using it with RLS in particular.
> 10% responded that tools aren’t use mature enough.
I've seen more than one person mention that the fact that RLS doesn't work on stable Rust is a sign of immaturity.
Also, in the context of people who had stopped using Rust:
> The rest of users mentioned [...] were turned away by Rust’s syntax, [...] or had a bad interaction with the Rust community.
Is anyone systematically looking over each of the responses that said either of these, in detail, in order to address them as well as possible?
Yeah I'm not sure that there's classic Vim support, langserver.org has two things that are both for NeoVim.
> Is anyone systematically looking over each of the responses
Someone (jntrnr) did read every single response, that's part of why this post took so long to produce. I just asked him about it, basically, he's going to be giving feedback to each of the teams about the stuff that was in their area, and they can act on it that way; so that'd be the language and community teams in these two cases.
Oh man yeah I'm using vim to play around with Rust, would like to see a tutorial in term of usage of the plugins. Like a tutorial with vim and the guess number example would be nice while using the vim plugins. Idea whatever and VScode is meh. VScode is on the cloud iirc meeeeh.
It's based on Electron/Chromium and uses JS for extensions, but it's a local program in every other way. It's also fairly snappy, maybe much more so than the usual Electron app.
It does have the usual broken font rendering on Windows, as does everything that is derived from Chrome. But that's no an issue on Linux or macOS.
What does it look like? Maybe I've just missed it.
Maybe someday Microsoft will port VSCode to Chakra.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6rx634/async_autocomp...
Not really. VSCode only one of few IDEs which have integrated debugger for Rust.
Actually I think it's the same problem with golang. Last time I used it, I had to browse VCS history of go project, they shipped vim plugin long time ago but then deleted it, I had to recover it from there and install it into ~/.vim/.
Furthermore, earlier in the year I upstreamed rust.vim https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/1356/ So if you're using a new enough vim, you shouldn't even need the plugin.
It's not well documented, but there's a much simpler way, which I used until recently (newer versions of vim already come with syntax highlighting for Rust out of the box):
Checkout https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.vim and copy everything there except the README/LICENSE/.gitignore to your ~/.vim directory, keeping the exact same directory structure.
Please let us know if you need any help!
[1]: https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/160#issuecomme...
[2]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/02/lang-ergonomics.html
I know how hard this is to pull off and I am not trying to say they have done a poor job; I genuinely want to know what others consider a breaking change.
use std::cell::*;
struct MoveCell;
This kind of breakage can still happen, even though we care a lot about stability.
The guiding principle is "it should not be painful to update the compiler", and I think we do as good a job as we can making sure that that's true.
It seems like the vast majority of cases you've enumerated are in the category of "code won't compile". Perhaps some have a knee-jerk reaction against this, but to me this is kind of incompatibility seems much more preferable to the other, especially if the update required to the code is trivial and obvious.
- Patching up soundness holes causing previously-unsound code to error (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/43651 is an example)
- Changing inference in a way that may require new annotations
- Adding types and things to modules which may cause clashes on glob imports (steve's example above)
- Adding methods to types (this may cause code calling trait methods to require disambiguation via the fully qualified UFCS syntax)
- Adding new trait impls (similar disambiguation issues)
- Lint changes (If you `#[deny(lint)]` a lint, this may cause compilation failures). Cargo passes --cap-lints=warn to dependencies so a lint change will at most cause your dependencies to spew extra warnings and cause your code to stop compiling, in a way that's trivial to fix (allow the lint, or fix the warning).
In general for all releases we run cargobomb to look out for breakages, both "okay" ones and not okay ones. Additionally, for the first two kinds of breakages (and other miscellaneous iffy changes) we proactively cargobomb. Even if something is technically allowed by our stability rules we want to make sure that practically speaking it has minimal impact.
For example, one of the timely traits had `min` and `max` methods, as it corresponded to a type with upper and lower bounds. Rust added `min` and `max` convenience methods to all implementors of `Ord` (which this type was), which now means that anyone who wants to use the type needs to use UFCS. Or, I issue a major break so that their lives don't suck (now `minimum` and `maximum`).
The Rust change was classified as fixing a "papercut", so that folks wouldn't have to `use std::cmp::{min, max};`, but it's a pain in the arse when it's done so casually.
Feel free to factor in that approximately five people use crates that I write, and most of them have bigger problems than Rust breakage. :)
Isn't this more-or-less true of any statically-typed language? I can't think of any off the top of my head that have the behavior of implicitly re-defining a type when a new definition is encountered after another definition was previously brought into scope.
Even C isn't that sadistic:
$ echo "\
> #include <time.h>
> struct tm {};" | cc -ansi -xc -
<stdin>:2:8: error: redefinition of 'struct tm'
struct tm {};
^~
In file included from <stdin>:1:0:
/usr/include/time.h:74:8: note: originally defined here
struct tm {
^~ use std::cell::*;
struct Cell;
[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/cargobomb [2]: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
We did have one developer who was excited about using Rocket (which he said was much better than the other Rust web frameworks he had tried), but we decided that the grief of building production code on unstable wasn't worth it.
(We're also holding off on directly using futures in any major way until the developer ergonomics and especially error messages get better.)
I've seen some proposed solutions in progress for that, at the moment, such as standardizing panic_fmt (needed to write no_std applications).
I love rust, but the community's politics is very odd to me.
Just odd socially-charged community management and documentation. I get a strong impression that the lead contributors (perhaps it's a mozilla cultural affect?) are very interested in pushing their equality agenda. Not that I don't subscribe to it in theory, it's just very tacky to me.
(I could easily imagine it in the community management so I'll take your word for that, but I've only really interacted with the IRC channels where this wasn't an issue)
Edit: replaced “minority” with “underrepresented group”, as that is the language used on the website [1].
[1]: http://blog.rustfest.eu/this-week-in-rustfest-5-tickets-dive...
Having just looked this up because I wasn't aware of it, I wouldn't classify that statement as true. They allow/ask for donations to help people from diverse locations attend.
https://ti.to/asquera-event-ug/rustfest-zurich/
NOTE: THIS IS NOT A CONFERENCE TICKET. Support us bringing the opportunity to attend RustFest to more people around the globe who otherwise couldn't afford it. Anything you offer here will go into our diversity pool with the sole purpose of helping people from underrepresented groups attend RustFest.
That doesn't mean minorities necessarily, and even if it did, it doesn't mean everyone in that group gets a cheaper ticket. From the first sentence though, it seems obvious they are trying to get diverse nationalities, not necessarily diverse ethnicity from the hosting country.
RustFest sponsors folks who couldn't otherwise attend with tickets (and sometimes travel and other things, I forget the details). This includes students (IIRC)
They also have tickets on the site which you can buy to add money to the sponsorship pool.
> We believe in diversity and would like to provide support to people of many different backgrounds. This includes, but is not limited to people who belong to one or more of the following groups: people of color, women, nonbinary and gender non-conforming people, disabled people, people with mental health issues, and LGBTQIA+ people.
Scholarships are a pretty normal thing wrt conferences.
First of all: RustFest is unaffiliated with Rust, the project. We are in touch, but we run our own ship. I _am_ member of the Rust community team, but my function within RustFest is not that one. Currently, I am the only person in the team with _any_ capacity within Rust, the project.
Most applications for this program are from places that the Rust community currently does not cover with conferences, which has a value to the wider community (spread). It is the express goal of this program to speak to people we would otherwise not reach. We had great success with our outreach program and it's meeting it's intended goal (having a more fun crowd around). We constantly tune it. We've been working and improving this program since around 10 conferences (I ran eurucamp and JRubyConf.EU before and are in close contact with other conferences running such stuff). Almost all people buying a ticket fund these things by either buying a supporter ticket (at 200EUR) or a small donation. They approve.
So, this may be "social politics", I'm very upfront about this, but this is not "we throw something at the wall and see if it sticks". No, we do it precisely because it is a working driver to growing a community. We have a stated goal: a more diverse community many people feel welcome to. We measure, we improve. Just 1.3% of respondents of this survey said they feel "not welcome", I consider that a smashing success. That's around 1/30th of the people that don't use Rust.
Yes, we give out scholarships to people that could or would otherwise not attend the conference. This is according to multiple factors, ranging from being unemployed to being a person from a marginalised group.
I also find it telling that you single this statement out, but for example pass on our wide commitment for accessibility http://zurich.rustfest.eu/accessibility/, which is much more extensive than what most other conferences provide. Also something we've been working on since _years_ and constantly improved. It attracts people. A great many conferences are very sub-standard here.
We do, by the way, also have a travel stipend for people that contributed to the current Rust quality push: http://blog.rustfest.eu/libz-blitz
Note that RustFest is a fully produced 2 days conference at a price point of 100 Euro or 50 Euro for Students which pays _all speakers full travel_ and is able to pay support for people in need. Running all 6 months. That's _dirt cheap_ if you consider we have to pay all bills and no one is giving us stuff for free. We are a sustainable business, if you want to consider it such.
In the end, I want to state clearly: sales and invites to our conference are at our own discretion, that's why we run them. It's the privilege of our work, we're not cogs silently turning a stage.
Have you ever used a discount that was available only for "new customers"?
EDIT: I see that 'Manishearth pointed out that these are not discounts, but scholarships.
While the example isn't within official documentation, it does demonstrate the lead Rust devs placing a lot of importance on social politics, and tip-toeing around such politically sensitive topics as coding style.
Again, as the OP stated, nothing in how the Rust development community handles itself can be stated as bad. They go out of their way to be inclusive to everyone, and I think that's admirable. The way they go about it, at least from the example I found, is a bit tacky. There are more important things to bikeshed about than the name of a simple option, and in doing so it can come across as a bit tacky. But what do I know, perhaps I'm the real problem here!
It was about changing the name of a lint from "bad-style" to "non-standard-style".
I still don't understand what this change has anything to do with social politics. Nor was this really related to being inclusive or whatever, it was just about being nicer.
Sure, there are more important things to do. But that's true for just about any bikeshed, that's pretty much a prerequisite for a discussion to be a bikeshed.
> While the example isn't within official documentation, it does demonstrate the lead Rust devs placing a lot of importance on social politics, and tip-toeing around such politically sensitive topics as coding style.
That's a major extrapolation. I'm not a lead rust dev (I do have commit/r+, I guess that can count). I drive-by filed an issue during a conference talk that I thought would be a small improvement that would be nicer to newbies and also just more accurate ("bad style" doesn't actually convey anything, why is it bad?). Various rust devs posted opinions and thoughts there.
Nobody was tiptoeing or anything. You're grossly misrepresenting what happened there.
Imagine approaching Linus Torvalds at a conference and telling him that you think people who choose to disobey the documented code style (which I, and most others, do not necessarily use outside of Linux kernel code) are just using "non-standard code style".
But as you yourself mention, folks use different code styles in different places. This is about being clearer about that.
The better analogy here is GCC calling non-GNU style C code "bad" in all repos it is run on.
Rust as a community is much more uniform wrt code style than C is, which is why the compiler even does things like warn about nonstandard style, but that's just it -- the style is non standard, not intrinsically bad in anyway (and "nonstandard" is better at explaining what's wrong than "bad" is).
In what wicked world do you live where the word "bad" is considered as a "not-nice" word should not be said in order not to risk offending people ? What's next ? Replacing "error" by "potential incorrectness" ? This is 1984-like. No one should have to be afraid of words.
Feel free to continue to call it bad style within the Rust community. Nothing 1984-like about it at all. It was a request for changing some wording, one which could have been rejected, and we would have moved on, because it was a drive-by issue that I didn't care about much.
You're ascribing a lot of intent and background to that post, intent that wasn't there.
- User doesn't like that dining philosophers is cited with some male and/or gender-neutral pronouns and placeholders (even though the original exposition was already changed to female pronouns) -- proceeds to change the rest of the pronouns to female (I guess gender-neutral didn't make sense) https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/25640
- User thinks "bad code style" is offensive https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/41646
- User doesn't like brotli encoding type being called "bro" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366559#c147
- User thinks that the code of conduct is too general in its suggestions that all people be respected and treated fairly -- it needs to explicitly cite certain groups https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-www/issues/268
This stuff is absolutely ridiculous. Write a code of conduct, make sure everyone is respected, and make that the end of it. Changing documentation to gender-neutral pronouns is something I can actually get behind -- nevertheless, that's still not fair apparently.
But that's exactly what all of your examples are. In each situation the decision and action was to make things as neutral and inclusive as possible. That there are people in any given community which want things to be taken in a different direction (any direction, social or otherwise) seems like a pretty natural thing.
For a programming language community though I don't think that's the kind of approach to take. Sure, it could work and you may get some very talented people to help, but it's also arbitrarily limiting the kinds of people who can contribute and feel welcome based on the thickness of their skin, not on their technical ability. You may consider this timewasting, but I think it's more like a clever and nuanced form or marketing. Not only do you get the benefits of including more potentially skilled people into your community, you encourage them to actually get involved with the language. It seems like a worthwhile investment to me.
Dude what you listed are trivialities and if you consider the throughput of Rust project the time taken must surely be negligible. I wonder what Theo or Brad think about timewasting on that other paragon of a project you mentioned.
The real difference in why the kernel can work with that and other projects can't is the D in BDFL. What Linus says goes, so there's an ultimate arbiter (for better or worse) that can settle these problems, and set the tone. The LKML doesn't need a code of conduct because Linus is the example of conduct, which in this case is "words don't matter put up or shut up". That'f fine, as long as you're aware and okay with marginalizing the people that don't deal well with that, which can, and has happened on the LKML. But that's a choice for Linus. Rust doesn't have a BDFL, so there's no ultimate authority to define what's right or wrong for Rust and the community around it (as much as a BDFL can for something at large as a language). In that situation, a code of conduct that exists to set some sane defaults can be useful.
1) "User" is the principal engineer of most of Gecko's network stack and pointing out that using that name will lead to complaints during the standardization.
2) The code in question isn't Rust at all.
I mean why even bring this up given (2)?
I didn't know that. The fact that a lead engineer is entertaining people who are upset with "brotli" being abbreviated to "bro" is honestly case in point.
2) Again, what has it got to do with Rust?!
Rust goes to great lengths to keep everyone happy, but ends up putting off people like you, who don't like projects going to great lengths to keep everyone happy :)
Our code of conduct [1] has been the fundamental cornerstone of our project and community since the beginning. Every large institution ends up having to choose explicitly or implicitly how they deal with conflict. We wanted to put our beliefs up front to enable people to choose if they want to participate with us, or not.
When you boil it down, it's really "don't be a jerk". It doesn't seem to be that big of an ask that people don't harass each other, and for people to understand that everyone's situation is different. A lot of people have been discouraged from participating in tech, from active things like aggressive or rude language and sexualized imagery, to passive things like not providing for child care or mothers rooms at conferences. These are all things that are pretty simple to manage if you're aware of it.
It's our belief that not only is this just the right thing to do, it's our best strategy of growing our community. I don't have any proof, but I do attribute our welcoming community to why we have 1,856 contributors to just our compiler.
We actually did ask about this, but unfortunately it's quite time consuming to process through all the free text entry like this one. Some of the popular things people want from nightly are Clippy, impl traits, RLS, SIMD, and compiler plugins, which isn't surprising. It'll take some time to dig through the rest of the comments to see if there is anything unexpected.
I'm hoping to do follow on posts as we go, but no promises :)
Only 1.3% specifically responded with not feeling welcome, which seems quite low to me.
Just installed 1.20 now, giving it another try. IntelliJ support helps.
IntelliJ's plugin just became officially supported by the company, so let's hope it gets even better from here!