When people bitch about the borrow checker, what they usually mean is “std::move is a great wristwatch but god damn does it chafe as a chastity belt”.
I don’t mean to be obtuse but I don’t see what that has to do with linear typing as a fucking weird mandatory default?
Rust was shaped by Mozilla wanting a language to replace parts of Firefox with. A language that is low-level enough to give very high performance, enforces correctness through the type system, and yet has many abstractions so it feels modern and convenient to use.
Rust doesn't have any automatic allocations. You can wrap every type in `Arc<Mutex<T>>` and treat it like a very verbose Python, but that's the programmers choice.
The design decisions have been validated by the success of Rust in certain domains.
There is a reason why more than one programming language exists...
If it wasn’t actively seeking world domination I’d be like, cool let’s use that sometimes.
Rust is so hell bent on a Rust monoculture ranging from stuff like TRACTOR to actively opposing interop that a few of us who know our shit have to be like “easy now” once in a while.
I’m trying to decide between tiktoken and sentencepiece for a new vocabulary at the moment, and it would be easier in some ways to go with tiktoken.
But I want it to run faster than a fart at inference time, which means I’m linking libtorch, which means I’m writing C++.
And fuck, link to Rust from C++? Let’s take another look at the Google stuff.
Rust just uses the C ABI for interop (including interop with Rust code that might not be part of the same build, such as dynamically-linked program objects). So you just have to come up with a plain C API for the interface and write wrappers on both sides of the divide that reference the C API. There are crates that will help with this, even achieving something like a "stable ABI" for Rust interop.
(And we'll probably see some work into interop with Swift itself (which has a stable ABI of its own) once there's enough interest in that as a memory safe language.)
But bindgen/cbindgen/cxx/etc exist for a reason: it hurts like a root canal.
In my particular case, tiktoken is substantially like 600 lines of Rust. If I have a deadline do I fuck with the linker or just write it again? I’m marshaling std::string here, fuck let’s just write it.
What I’m not going to re-write because I’m not a magnificent maniac like geohotz? I’m not going to rewrite libtorch. Which is written in C++ like all the software you can’t really live without.
Hylo specifically says it intends "world domination" (next year in fact, having apparently completed all the delayed 2023 goals and also all its 2024 goals this year, I guess maybe they're going to do it all in December?)
But I don't really see this from Rust. I'm sure Hylo's "world domination" is a joke, but, so is the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force". Rust people I've interacted with strike me as very much more accepting of the "better tool" theory than of some weird cult or panacea. When somebody in a Rust forum says (e.g. about JPEG XL) "Ooh we should use Rust" and I say "No, WUFFS. This problem is what WUFFS is for" the responses tend to be a mix of "Yeah, I guess" and "I didn't know that existed. Thanks for the link" rather than cultist denial.
I admire both the technical sophistication and passion you folks bring to the table, the one true language thing just isn’t my bag. I pine for the Halcyon days when HN was run by the Rust people rather than the LLM idiots.
Keep doing what you’re doing, one hacker to another.
Now GHC does stack allocate, but it’s hard to count on without really aggressive hinting.
An `async {}` block is not evaluated, but converted into a generator/state machine that lives on the stack, and that has to be advanced by calling a poll method. You can move it to the heap , but that does not happen automatically.
Sharing of values is obviously much more awkward due to mutability and no automatic cloning though.
But to be clear, anyone with the username the_duke is probably really cool, and you clearly know your stuff as well as having style, so count me as a fan.
But not so much in the conditional branch sense of the phrase “control flow”.
More like, I’ve got a bunch of references and one of them is a reference to a function I might evaluate, damn, I need that reference and the transitive closure of everything it knows about, all of which are probably on the heap.
A space leak, much like any memory leak is when you or the compiler or the runtime or whoever misplaces such reference.
GHC having a closure in scope in no way immediately means there is a space leak. Plenty of Haskell code that compiles to thunks will run all day in an amortized fixed-size heap.
Much like Erlang, which is what Joe Armstrong had designed before he said the thing about jungles you’ve quoted.
And it is in no way difficult or even really rare to drop an Arc in a table and leak all over the place.
Rust has all the same computer science problems as anything else. Full stop.
The laziness as a default just makes boxing closure values a sensible default, when the type system requires the boxing of everything in general.
Parametric polymorphism is kind of orthogonal to that. It’s related I guess. It can involve some kind of runtime dispatch, but usually that gets JITed or inlined or whatever unless you really insult the compiler.
And even full frontal invokedynamic it’s still like, is it in the BTB and the I-cache? Ok well we’re still doing business.
I like a lot of things about Rust: it’s got compiler checked exhaustive pattern match and a good initialization syntax and Either baked in and fucking correct package management and a ton of other things.
I’ll look at Clean to see if linear-only memory management can be done gracefully. Rust is a lot of cool things but not the language that demonstrated that.