Hacker News Reader

Comment by ban-lan-gen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all those rust hypes here. What indeed does rust bring to the table?

This comes up a lot but I never get tired of answering it. There might not be anything about Rust that is interesting to you personally but generally the benefits are different depending on what language you're coming from:

If you're coming from C/C++/C# you get very good memory guarantees, a standard library that is very well fleshed out, a well supported package manager and a fairly robust (though a bit immature still) ecosystem.

If you're coming from Java or Golang, you have the benefit that now your code can be consumed by other languages. You also get the memory guarantees, better error handling ergonomics, and in the case of Java the ecosystem is much higher quality and safer (at least in my extensive experience).

From Java specifically (and any of its derived languages), you loose all the operational and memory problems that come with just starting the JVM.

If you're coming from Python, Ruby, JavaScript the biggest benefit is probably performance but you get all the benefits that Java and Golang do as these are also dead end languages.

There is a lot of quality of life, safety, security, and performance benefits but what matters the most to YOU is going to largely depend on where you're coming from, what you want to build in it, and what your priorities are. It legitimately isn't for everyone, but its a VERY good choice as a default language.

For me: compared to C/C++ enforced memory safety and a sensible approach to async/await in a fast language.

Hype as in, why announce that it was made in Rust? Well to me, because i like to see the languages things are made in, and i especially like to see projects i would be interested in contributing to (read: also using my preferred language at the time).

It was the same for Go when i was using Go. Why is this always debated?

When I browsed GitHub repos. I came across some repos that implied "Because my thing is written in Rust, it automatically comes with a good performance, good scalability, etc". Jumping into a new language because people said it has good performance without actually understanding suited applications and the reason it gives a good performance seems to be a hype to me. It can be just my own bias. Maybe people out there already have a very solid understanding of Rust.

The times I've searched for Rust stuff on GitHub I've mostly found junk, like projects people wrote while they were learning Rust, also leaving them abandoned.

Maybe you should search around for solid projects and look into them in order to gain appreciation the language.

Or watch a couple of videos from Jon Gjengset, like his recent "Implementing (part of) a BitTorrent client in Rust" [0] while keeping in mind that the code he's writing is memory safe, which would probably not be the case with C at the same expertise level and speed of development. And considering that it is a BitTorrent client, one would definitely want it to be memory safe.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf_ddGnum_4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com