Comment by jgraham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgraham | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've shipped relatively lots of code in Python and a little bit in Rust.

For any project where performance or correctness are significant concerns I'd much rather use Rust than Python. It provides a lot more tools to help you write correct code, and express invariants in a machine-checkable way. This means that they are maintained when the code changes, even when multiple contributors are involved. I'm must more confident in my ability to ship correct code in Rust and maintain that correctness over time.

Rust also doesn't have the performance ceiling (floor?) of Python, either for single threaded programs, or — especially — for those that benefit from concurrency or parallelism. Of course for some progames there's a clear hot loop that you could implement as a native extension in Python, but other workloads have relatively flat profiles where the performance bottlenecks are making allocations or similar.

As well as the actual language features, the commitment to backward compatibility from the Rust authors means that you don't get regular breakage simply from updating to a newer version of the language. I think Python 2 being 2.7 for such a long time gave people a false impression of how stable a foundation Python provides and the fact that point releases of 3.x often cause problems feels like it causes a lot of unnecessary makework for Pyton users and is rather offputting.

That doesn't mean I'd always choose Rust of course. You do require more upfront design to get something that works at all. Some projects also benefit greatly from not requiring a compile step and making use of the ubiquity of a Python interpreter. And I think I'd find it difficult to justify using Rust for a typical web backend that's mostly composing together various well-tested libraries to provide an API on top of a database.

My only bone to pick with this commentary is that it is 2020 and people are still complaining about Python as being unstable because of 2 -> 3.

It was a rough transition, to be sure. Python2 was released 20 years ago, and Python3 12 years ago. It is a pretty stable language.

My housemate was just rolling back from python 3.8 to 3.7 yesterday due to a backwards incompatible change breaking a library... it's not just 2 -> 3 that makes python relatively unstable compared to rust.

What the issue?

Yup, similar is 3.5->3.7. The community also doesn't seem to value backwards-compatiblity, judging from the libraries.

And I recently had to roll back from Python 3.9 to 3.7 to work around a couple different problems with the cffi and zstandard libraries on macOS 11.

How does library breakage reflect on Rust? Python's deprecation policy is 2 years, only a year less than that of Rust's Epoch system.

Epoch's don't break libraries - that's the whole point.

They manage this by allowing using a different epoch in a library than the application that uses it, and defaulting to the original epoch if you don't ask to use a new one.

The vast majority of rust 1.0 libraries should still work with modern rust programs, I vaguely recall that there was one minor backwards incompatible change as of a result of memory safety bug (an exception to the guarantee), but I can't remember what it was and I can't find it with google so it might actually be all rust 1.0 libraries still work.

It's specifically complaining about point releases of 3.x, it only mentions 2 in an unrelated way.

The fix for https://bugs.python.org/issue40870 caused me some grief when upgrading from 3.8.3 to 3.8.4 (though to be fair, the ast module has different stability guarantees).

I don't think the parent is talking about Python 2 -> 3. I think they are pointing out that for many developers, moving to Python 3 happened very late. That means they ran 2.7 since 2010 (roughly 10 years now.) Now that they are on 3.x, they get issues with each new 3.x release.

The argument is that being on 2.7 for so long gave a false impression of the language being more stable than it is - developers just weren't using new versions.

Some people are still using 2.7 in production.

Maybe there will be a company like Red Hat that announces to support python 2.7 indefinitely, although I doubt it.

Well to be fair the 2020 end of life date was announced almost a decade ago. That said, I know that fortune 500 companies that used 2.7 to develop new code in 2017 -- which was a mistake -- mostly because they were tied to old version of RHEL and they were too lazy to try to get Python 3 to work on an old version of RHEL.

So 2020 rolled around and the pypi libraries they were using were no longer supported even though RHEL would support python 2.7. So yeah, it was a really bad experience for everyone involved.

Some industries are very very slow when it comes to upgrades. E.g. the VFX reference platform[0] only adopted python 3 for the 2020 baseline, which means many recently released products are still embedding python 2.x [1].

[0] https://vfxplatform.com/ [1] https://vfxpy.com/

> For any project where performance or correctness are significant concerns I'd much rather use Rust than Python. It provides a lot more tools to help you write correct code, and express invariants in a machine-checkable way. This means that they are maintained when the code changes, even when multiple contributors are involved. I'm must more confident in my ability to ship correct code in Rust and maintain that correctness over time.

Any reason for why Rust over Ada/SPARK?

If you have a lot of string handling the strictness and ease of safe zero copy in Rust would make it unbeatable for performance and safety.

Due to lifetimes it's easy to keep string slices as references into the original memory and if you do need to modify some strings, you can use CoW.

The way Rust deals with encoding also makes it much safer to use Rust. Since you need to be very explicit about which encoding you convert to what and if you want to allow lossy conversions.

I don't think there is much of an equivalent in ADA for this. ADA has other benefits, like the delta (fixed point) types which help a lot in embedded projects.

Ada/Spark is more about mathematically proving that your program works. Rust is more about that your program won't trample memory and won't crash.

That said, Rust seems to have reasonably good performance compared to C/C++. Also the concept of lifetimes is interesting too.

Just because your program compiles in C++/Ada(no-spark)/C/Java/Rust doesn't mean it's correct. If it compiles in Rust, the compiler is telling you it's memory safe and thread safe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com