"Rust" really just means "Not javascript" as a recurring pattern in these articles.
So "Rust" means "Not JavaScript, and also a bunch of other constraints that mean that Rust is pretty much the only sensible choice."
Hum, no. The point is exactly that it would help a great deal if you moved to Python or Ruby or PHP.
Of course, Rust will give you even better memory efficiency. But Javascript is a particularly bad option there, and almost anything else would be an improvement. ("Almost", because if you push it enough and move to something like MathLab, you'll get worse results.)
[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=composite...
Also, I don't know what Node is doing exactly, but if you take a lot of these dynamic languages and just fork them into multiple processes, which they still largely need to do to effectively use all the CPUs, you will generally see high per-process memory consumption just like Node. Any memory page that has a reference counter in it that is used by your code ends up Copied-On-Write in practice by every process in the steady state because all you need to do to end up copying the page is looking at any one reference it happens to contain in such a language. At least in my experience memory sharing gains were always minimal to effectively zero in such cases.
I have not found this to be generally true. It depends heavily on whether your code is limited by pure high level language code[1] and culture makes comparisons harder if you’re not just switching languages but also abstraction models and a big stack of optimizations. In theory Java beats Python but in practice I’ve seen multiple times where a Java program was replaced by Python seeing whole number multiple improvements in performance and reductions in memory consumption because what was really happening is that a bunch of super complicated, optimization-resistant Java framework code was being replaced with much simpler code which was easier to optimize. Node is closer to that side of Java culturally, I think in both cases because people reacted to the limited language functionality by building tons of abstractions which are still there even after the languages improved so even though it’s possible to do much better a lot of programmers are still pushing around a lot of code with 2000s-era workarounds buried in the middle.
1. I’m thinking of someone I saw spend months trying to beat Python in Go and eking out a 10% edge because the bulk of the work devolved to stdlib C code.
While I fully believe that a Python program with a superior O()-complexity class can beat Java (or, indeed, any language), and that a simpler Python program can hypothetically beat a Java program that is just too complicated, it would also be the case that taking that faster Python program and then porting that into Java would then see order of magnitude+ speed increases. Python is slow. When comparing languages I generally add the caveat "with some non-zero and comparable amount of time dedicated to optimization" to try to build a reasonable comparison, because most programs that have had no effort done on optimization at all will have their performance dominated by something stupid that the programmer didn't even realize they wrote.
The speed increases aren't relevant if the old Java was "too slow" and the new Python is "fast enough". Every program I've ever written could be made faster... but they're all fast enough now.
Pure Python with some non-trivial optimization effort can not beat a Java program with some non-trivial optimization effort, and that's before the Java code starts using multiple CPUs, if the problem is amenable to that.
This is not cheerleading, dumping on Python, or promoting Java, as if anything my personal biases are in fact the other way (tbh I don't particularly like either at this point but I'd much rather be using Python). This is just engineering stuff that good engineers should know: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2024/not_about_python/
I'll quote "Technology Holy Wars are Coordination Problems": [1]
> The enduring phenomenon of holy wars in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: the problem is not getting everyone to make a good decision, but making the same decision.
I agree that you can make better software engineering decisions if you avoid thinking like a fan and that a poor choice of language can hinder a project from the start. In light of what is at stake, though, "engineers should never be fans" is an unrealistic call for peace. It reminds me of this dialogue: [2]
> There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
[1] https://gwern.net/holy-war
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
My guess is that if you were to rewrite this same app in straight Python (no Rust at all), it would probably already give you "Tier 3" performance.
But sure, I bet there are a bunch of use cases where nodejs would be faster than Python.
What leads you to believe in that?
Also, it has so few footguns compared to C or C++ even modestly experienced developers can safely use it.
It's a function of popularity and widespread use. The only languages that do not feature CVEs are the ones that are not used.
Eve Rust started to feature in CVEs, including memory safety problems in it's standard library. Somehow that fact is omitted from these discussions.
> (...) even experts failing to use those languages correctly (...)
I couldn't help noticing you felt the need to resort to weasel words like "correctly" to add color to an unsubstantiated personal assertion.
What's the best example you can come up with to support your opinion?
> C++ isn’t horrible but it’s harder to use, harder to find good developers (...)
This personal assertion is comical, as recruiters are systematically targeting C++ developers for Rust positions, and Rust is notoriously bad for newbies to onboard onto.
I'd prefer these debates were kept at an objective and substantiated level, but it seems that's too much to ask. It seems it's easier to throw unsubstantiated claims around and wait to see if half the bullshit sticks.
Oh, please. Nobody is saying that Rust is perfect, only that the defect rate in normal usage is considerably lower and tend to be concentrated in areas like “unsafe” blocks rather than spread randomly around the code base.
> I couldn't help noticing you felt the need to resort to weasel words like "correctly" to add color to an unsubstantiated personal assertion. … This personal assertion is comical, as recruiters are systematically targeting C++ developers for Rust positions, and Rust is notoriously bad for newbies to onboard onto.
“Correctly” isn’t a weasel word, especially not in the context of describing how a program functions. I was referring to the common excuse that has cropped up over decades where language proponents try to blame problems on the user rather than acknowledging that certain features are hard to use safely.
I’ve been hearing people say that C/C++ are fine and you just need better programmers since the 90s, which has not been an effective strategy in reducing the number of security vulnerabilities. My comment about easier to learn was written in the context of reaching the level needed to reliably write safe code, not just producing a compilable program which doesn’t immediately crash since even large, elite teams with enormous resources struggle with memory safety bugs in large C/C++ code bases.
For example, Android reports halving their code rollback rate and a significant reduction in the number of vulnerabilities by switching to memory-safe languages. Clearly relying on programmer vigilance and testing was not as effective as picking tools which made certain classes of error much harder.
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...
This is the kind of fallacies that dominate Rust fanboy's discourse.
You start off by mindlessly commenting on "constant stream of CVEs", but when you're faced with the reality that Rust also piles up CVEs then you start to try to move goalposts around. Odd how you switched from CVE talk to vague allusions of "perfection", as if now CVEs don't matter.
That's the problem with your type of fanaticism: you stop makint technical claims and instead resort to sweeping baseless accusations,as if that was a positive trait on a language and it's community.
> “Correctly” isn’t a weasel word, especially not in the context of describing how a program functions.
It is. There is no way around it.
> My comment about easier to learn was written in the context of reaching the level needed to reliably write safe code (...)
Again with the goalpost-moving/weasel word combo.
Rust is notoriously unfriendly to beginners and imposes an unparalleled learning curve. Around a quarter of new developers outright give up and quit over how unusable it is to them. This is acknowledged by the Rust community itself as demonstrated by the last annual Rust survey. There is no way around it. I don't know why anyone would try to waste time handwaving over this.
> For example, Android reports halving their code rollback rate and a significant reduction in the number of vulnerabilities by (...)
Here's the problem with this sort of specious reasoning. You are cherry-picking an example of how a project invested heavily in memory safety and therefore ended up lowering vulnerabilities. You ignore how much work was invested into processes and prioritizing specific types of problems. You instead decide to ignore everything and anything, and opt to go the simplistic path of pretending that the only step required to achieve these gains is onboarding a magical tool, as if nothing else was a factor.
Do you understand how this blend of cargo cult mentality is silly and unproductive?
I get it that you feel the need to promote a tool you like. That's fine. But if you had a case you wouldn't feel compelled to frame all your arguments on artificial scenarios you try to pin on all other tools, would you?
Take a chill pill, you have completely derailed you argument with personal attacks in place of substance. You would have to be willfully ignorant to think Rust isn't safer than C++, and I say that as someone who refuses to use Rust.
There are some cases where C++ makes sense:
* You have a large existing C++ codebase you need to talk to via a large API surface (C++/Rust FFI is not great)
* You have a C++ library that's core to your project and doesn't have a good Rust alternative (i.e. Qt)
* You don't like learning (and are therefore in completely the wrong industry!)
Basically the best place where Rust can work is one where all variables, all requirements and all edgecases are known ahead of time or cases where manual memory safety is a necessity vis-a-vis accepting a minor performance hike from things like the garbage collector. This works well in some spaces (notably; systems programming, embedded and Browser Engines and I wouldn't consider the latter a valid target), but webserver development is probably one of the furthest places where you are looking for Rust.
Beautiful
... And yet the fact that most of us know we're reinventing Lisp, and still doing it anyway, says something. I guess it says that we're just trying to get our jobs done.
Mainstream Lisp dialects have had objects other than lists for many, many decades. The LISP-1 programmer's manual from 1960, referencing the original language which started it all, describes zero-based arrays already.
In some Lisp-like languages, the syntax processing itself is based on arrays, like Janet. The parenthesized notation turns into a nested array, not a nested linked list.
In Lisps where the syntax is based on lists, that doesn't imply that your program has to work with list at run-time. The code-transformations (macros) which happen at compile time will be working with linked lists.
Budding computer scientists and engineers like to write toy Lisp dialects (sometimes in one weekend). Often, those languages only work with linked lists, and are interpreted, meaning that the linked lists representing the code structure are traversed to execute the program, and repeatedly traversed in the case of loops.
(If you're making remarks about an important historic language family based on familiarity with someone's toy Lisp project on github, or even some dialect with an immature implementation, that is a gross intellectual mistake. You wouldn't do that, would you?)
Linked lists may "kind of suck" on cached hardware with prefetch, but that doesn't prevent them from being widely used in kernels, system libraries, utilities, language run-times (internally, even in the run-times of languages not known for exposing linked lists to the programmer), ... C programmers use linked lists like they are going out of style.
No need to be pedantic. Obviously I’m not talking about a random toy lisp someone hacked together.
Linked lisps have their uses, obviously, but being the core data abstraction for your entire language kinda sucks nowadays.
I’m talking about lisp the language, not the philosophical concept. When people just say “lisp” referring to a specific language you can safely guess either scheme or Common Lisp.
You say you're not talking about a random toy Lisp someone threw together. Yet those kind of projects are the ones that have lists as the core or perhaps the only data abstraction for the entire language. If we search for the Lisps that make your remarks correct, that's mainly what we find.
I think this is a rare exception in production Lisps. One notable one is something called Pico Lisp. People take this seriously and use it, so we can't call it a toy. Yet it does almost everything with lists.
When people say Lisp nowadays no you cannot guess that it's Scheme or Common Lisp. It could be Clojure, or Fennel or others.
Scheme and Common Lisp are very different languages.
You may want to check the Common Lisp standard (a dialect, where its development goes back to 1982).
https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Cont...
From the table of contents you can see that the language spec prominently describes: CLOS objects, structures (records), condition objects (-> errors), symbols, packages (namespaces for symbols), multi-dimensional arrays, strings, hash tables, files, streams, ...
None of these standard data structures are linked list based.
For example when I write a Lisp form do define a structure, a record-like data structure:
(defstruct packet
sender
receiver
header
payload)
DEFSTRUCT is a macro, which defines a record data structure and a bunch of functions for it (accessors, getters, creater, type predicate, ...).
The Lisp compiler will expand the macro form into a much larger s-expression -> again a nested list.
The compiler will then process lists and a lot of other data structures (see above) and create MACHINE CODE for code defined by above record definition.
Structures themselves are by default VECTOR-like objects, with static access into its components. A getter will access the fixed offset into a record and the code for that will usually be inlined in the using code.
So we have two aspects:
* processing with linked lists on current CPUs is several orders of magnitude faster, than on the machines where Lisp was originally defined. It does not matter for most use cases on modern machines. For example any Apple Silicon is great for running Lisp.
* Lisp offers many other data structures, which are widely used in Lisp applications.
For example if I would need a bit vector, I would not use a linked list of numbers, but a real bitvector:
CL-USER 1 > (describe #*0000010010000011000000000)
#*0000010010000011000000000 is a (SIMPLE-ARRAY (UNSIGNED-BYTE 1) (25))
CL-USER 2 > (sbit #*0000010010000011000000000 5)
; get the fifth bit, using zero-based indexing
1
The result then is that optimizing Common Lisp compilers can generate code, which is fast enough for many applications.
So is in Common Lisp the linked list the "core data abstraction for your entire language"?
That's misleading. The "entire language" has many more data structures, which are not built on top of linked lists. For example arrays (strings, vectors, bitvectors, multidimensional arrays) are a part of the language, are widely used and are not made of linked lists.
- https://pyo3.rs/
- https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon
- https://github.com/mre/rust-language-bindingsIt's Ocaml
They are comfortable with runtimes
In a lot of languages you're working with a hammer and nail (metaphorically speaking) and when you move to a different language its just a slightly different hammer and nail. Rust is a screwdriver and screw though, and once I stopped trying to pound the screw in with the screwdriver, but rather use the one to turn the other, it was a lot easier. Greenfield projects with a lot of iteration are just as fast as doing it in python (although a bit more front-loaded rather than debugging), working new features into existing code - same thing.
Misconception.
You will encounter the borrow checker almost never when writing backend web code in Rust. You only encounter it the first time when you're learning how to write backend code in Rust. Once you've gotten used to it, you will literally never hit it.
Sometimes when I write super advanced endpoints that mutate global state or leverage worker threads I'll encounter it. But I'm intentionally doing stuff I could never do in Python or Javascript. Stuff like tabulating running statistics on health check information, batching up information to send to analytics services, maintaining in-memory caches that talk to other workers, etc.
This tends to work well for most crud api servers, since you allocate “context, request, and response” data at the start of the handler function, and deallocate at the end. Most helper data can also be tied to the request lifecycle. And data is mainly isolated per-request. Meaning there isn’t much data sharing across multiple request.
This means that the borrow checker “just works”, and you probably won’t even need lifetime annotations or even any special instructions for the borrow checkers. It’s the idealized use case the borrow checker was designed for.
This is also the property which most GC languages like Java, Go, and C# exploit with generational garbage collectors. The reason it “works” in Java happens to be the same reason it works in Rust.
If your server does need some shared in-memory data, you can start by just handing out copies. If you truly need something more complicated, and we are talking about less than 10% of crud api servers here, then you need to know a thing or two about the borrow checker.
I’m not saying to rewrite web servers in Rust, or even advocating for it as a language. I’m just pointing out that a crud api server is the idealized use case for a borrow checker.
The language never set out to solve this problem. It wasn't an intentional design goal. The language design and problem space just happen to overlap more or less perfectly.
Complete serendipity.
No
Once you learn to surrender to the borrow checker it becomes friend, not foe
You must submit
The performance benefits of Rust were supposed to be a non-penalty: "Look, you can please please use this where you'd use C or C++ I promise it won't impact your performance!" Performance and GC overhead was the rejection de jure of every other C replacement.
But here we are: All friends are javascript front-enders-turned-backenders and are wondering if they should pick up Rust. It fits into a pattern of "new shiny" but it's good, don't get me wrong, if everyone experiences compiled languages and starts writing their headless code in sensible languages.
Repeating myself, but I'm just wondering why not Go? Why now?
If you have sufficient experience, that's not really the case. Certainly compared to "comparable" languages like C++ where that time fighting the borrow checker might instead have been spent chasing random crashes.
But, if you want a dynamically typed experience, look no further than PHP or Perl. Also significantly faster, and, if I had to bet, you could probably iterate much faster in Perl. It wouldn't be fun, but honestly, I doubt that Perl is more footgunny than JS.