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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this comes across as just another Rust fanboy post, most likely written by a person without much programming experience in any of mentioned languages (including Rust). Especially the "Rust vs xxx: Advantages" seem cherry-picked at best and entirely random at worst.

> Rust is simply easier to approach, the learning curve is not very steep

Lol, yeah right.

> One of the biggest issues that are plaguing the developers are memory management issues.

...not an issue in any garbage collected language.

> some areas it may run even three times faster than Scala or Java

Statements like this are almost completely useless. Rust isn't automatically fast, and Java isn't automatically slow.

> it lets you write code that will most likely never go wrong as the compiler is there to check it all

Oh please...

> Rust is a popular programming language for cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

What, no AI?

Rust deserves better promotion than such a fluff piece.

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I used to mark assignments for a 4th year concurrency programming course taught in Rust. There were definitely a lot of buggy programs written in Rust like deadlocks, starvation, etc.

>> One of the biggest issues that are plaguing the developers are memory management issues.

> ...not an issue in any garbage collected language.

I pretty strongly disagree. It’s less of an issue in strongly typed languages but definitely null references and (arguably) type/encoding runtime errors are memory management issues much more common in garage collected languages.

What I love about Haskell (thousands of hours) and to a lesser degree rust (hundreds of hours) over most languages is that they are very expressive while at the same time the compiler catches what feels like 20x as many mistakes as I’d get from python or modern JavaScript.

Then it also runs faster, on a smaller footprint than most other stacks.

Both Haskell (and to a lesser degree) rust are much harder to learn than python/ruby/js but rust is probably on-par with c++ or java.

Since you're comparing Haskell and Rust, what do you think about functional style programming in Rust? Can you do similar things in Rust as you can in Haskell or is the lack of GC limiting here? (I suppose that Haskell has important reasons to have a GC).

I guess I can't say much about it. I am barely past a beginner as far as Rust goes, but I have not seen much embracing a functional style.

In fact with the emphasis on (mutable) references vs values; it seems to pretty much encourage the antithesis of functional programming.

What I really love about functional programming is the simplicity of understanding what is going on from looking at the code; functional programming does that by guaranteeing a "function" is always-and-only acting in a specific, simple way. Rust does it (not quite as strictly to my learning-eye) with forcing the tediousness of references/mutability up to the signatures.

> Rust deserves better promotion than such a fluff piece.

Agreed.

> Lol, yeah right.

It's a comparison with C++, where Rust is generally viewed as easier to learn. So OP has a valid point there.

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